“Suppose I open the mail?” I said. “I know the writing by now, and I’ll just sort out any of these things and throw them away.”
Charlotte shrugged, and laughed a little. “I guess I’m curious,” she said, “I want to know what they’ll think of next.”
Well, then, of course, the next one did it. We both recognized the handwriting on the envelope and I came around the table to watch Charlotte open it and she tore open the flap and two live spiders skidded out and one ran along her hand and up her arm. I thought she was going right then—and I think it was the first time I ever took the doctor seriously—because she screamed and jumped up and kicked over her chair and slapped at her arm and said, “Get it away, get it away.” I stepped on one of the spiders and took the second one off her arm and squeezed it between my fingers; I’ve never done such a thing in my life, but for some reason this particular spider just made me sick.
I had to call Doctor West from the village, and he put Charlotte to bed and I told him about the cards and the spiders and he looked as sick as I felt and said, “I can only believe that someone thinks it’s funny. Horrible thing to do, though.”
“He probably didn’t know how she loathes insects,” I said. “They horrify her.”
He nodded. “She ought to take it a lot easier, though, Miss Baxter,” he said. “I tell you, I don’t know what your doctor in town saw fit to warn you against, but I’m not going to try to confuse you or make you feel better by hiding it in a lot of medical phrases; Miss Allison is in a dangerous condition, and it’s not going to take much—” He had to stop because Charlotte was calling me, and then even so he held my arm long enough to say, “Watch out for Martha’s cooking; those rich cakes and fried chicken are no good at all for Miss Allison. And of course see that she doesn’t get any more spiders in the mail.”
“I’ll open everything,” I told him. “Even if it’s a man-eating tiger in an envelope.”
“Good girl,” he said.
Well, of course Martha thought the only thing she could do to show how mad she was at whoever sent those spiders was to get to work and make brown-sugar pie and shrimp casserole for lunch, and when I sat there with my plate full and saw Charlotte’s tray with the cup of vegetable soup and glass of buttermilk, what could I do?
“This once, only,” I said, passing her over my shrimp casserole. “I won’t tell the doc. But from now on it’s whole wheat bread and beet greens.”
“Certainly,” she said, diving into the shrimp.
“And no cigarettes.”
“I don’t smoke,” she said virtuously. “Doctor’s orders.”
I told Martha not to put her homemade strawberry preserves on the breakfast table anymore, and to butter the toast in the kitchen, and to use one slim pat of butter for four slices of toast, and not to serve more than four slices of toast. I began ordering a coffee without caffeine, but Charlotte raised such a fuss, I had to go back to our regular brand, but I made Martha serve only hot water and lemon juice at dinner. I broke Martha’s heart by ruling out absolutely all baked goods and all fried foods and all spices, which, since it eliminated fried chicken and blueberry pie and lamb curry, got Martha’s cooking down to a kind of basic boiled codfish, with now and then a lamb chop for variety. Charlotte began losing weight, and I began dropping in to the kitchen after dinner to take a little of whatever Martha had prepared for herself. “If I didn’t know it was doing her good,” I told Martha, my mouth full of kidney stew, “I’d give it up right now. It’s making her suffer.”
“Not right for a person not to eat,” Martha said.
“My God,” I said, “I can’t live on it.”
“You’re not sick,” Martha said reasonably. “After she’s gone, after all, you’ll still be eating good meals.”
“Doesn’t seem fair, does it? You and me eating kidney stew, and Charlotte…” I looked at Martha and she looked at me. “Why not?” I said.
“Shouldn’t do it,” Martha said.
“I don’t care.” I fixed a tray with a generous serving of kidney stew, threw on a couple of Martha’s hot yeast rolls, and a cup of coffee with plenty of cream and sugar. Then I stuck my tongue out at Martha and took the tray upstairs.
After that, whenever Martha made anything particularly nice, I took Charlotte along a tray; it was always done as a special treat, and Martha and I always pretended it was something unusual for Charlotte, and Charlotte and I always pretended it was a trick on Martha, and then after a while it seemed silly and Martha went back to making her regular meals and Charlotte and I got strawberry preserves for breakfast again.
The cards stopped coming, but Charlotte began finding little boxes of candy everywhere. Now, candy, and especially chocolate, was one thing she was absolutely not supposed to have, and leaving it around was about the crudest practical joke anyone could try, because Charlotte was one of those people who just can’t turn her back on a piece of candy. Not the way you and I eat candy, you see—if there was a dish of candy on the table, Charlotte couldn’t sit still until she’d polished it off, just keep coming back and coming back and knowing all the time she shouldn’t. I like candy well enough, and I used to keep some in my room until once Charlotte found out about it and made me give it to her, but as far as the house in general was concerned, I kept it out. Cooking chocolate in the pantry and not even Charlotte could eat that—but no sweets of any kind around where anyone could get at them. Even Charlotte hadn’t the nerve to go dipping sugar out of the sugar bowl, so we were all right until this joker started getting little boxes of candy to Charlotte. First it came in the mail, a small sample box of sweet chocolate, and naturally I couldn’t stop Charlotte from going right at it, even in the middle of breakfast. Then one day I found a box of chocolates on the living room table, and I knew Martha hadn’t put them there, and I didn’t dare ask Charlotte, so I gave them to Martha to take home, but Charlotte wandered into the kitchen and saw them. Then it got worse. Little wax paper packages, two or three pieces, would turn up on her dresser—homemade fudge, sometimes, or caramels, or orange creams, or plain chocolate—and sometimes I found them and of course sometimes I didn’t. I remember once I found a package in the pocket of her dressing gown, and one in the drawer of her desk, next to her checkbook. I knew I wasn’t finding them all because she was always asking Martha for soda for indigestion or heartburn, and of course that was no good for her either. Then one day I came into her room without knocking, just to catch her, and there she was eating candy and with a cigarette in her hand, and of course I was just as mad as could be. I threw the candy into the wastebasket and took away the cigarette—and the pack of cigarettes in her pocket, too, by the way—and said, “Now, look, hon, this is really getting out of hand. What on earth do you think you’re doing?”
It was the first time she was ever sullen with me. As I say, we did a good deal of fighting, back and forth, but always giving as good as we got, and here she was now, acting like a child caught stealing a nickel out of its mother’s pocketbook, and I felt awful. “I’ve got a right to do as I please,” she said.
“Not if you deliberately harm yourself. You know this is all bad for you. Smoking, and eating rich candy, and trying to keep it all a secret.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “I can enjoy myself if I want to.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said, and then something occurred to me, because that didn’t sound at all like Charlotte, and I went and put my hand into her bathrobe pocket and took out a note, written the way the cards had been addressed—left-handed, and in purple ink—and the note said, “You got a right to enjoy yourself.”
“Where did you get this?” I asked, disgusted.
“It was with the cigarettes,” she said, and then she smiled up at me, like my old Charlotte. “Don’t I have a right?” she wanted to know.
“Look,” I said, “what I want is that you’ll still be enjoying yourself next year at this time. You’ve gotten into a state of mind where you think fooling me is enjoy
ing yourself. Go ahead and fool me all you like—send me spiders in the mail if it gives you any pleasure—but just keep off the cigarettes and the candy and stuff.”
I shouldn’t have reminded her of the spiders; her face got all sick again and she turned away from me and wouldn’t talk anymore. And I suppose the candy and stuff kept coming because she kept talking about indigestion and she began to look frightened, as though she couldn’t stop herself anymore and knew just the same that she was getting worse. We weren’t making our little jokes anymore; somehow people had stopped thinking of her as being so courageous, I suppose because she looked so terrible, and had started talking about how long she could last, and where she had left the money. I was pretty sure she had left the money to me, but I was getting more and more worried about how long she could last, so I went and had a talk with Doctor West in the village about the secret candy and cigarettes.
“There’s no controlling her,” I said to him, and he shook his head.
“I don’t know of any cruelty like it,” he said. “You might better give her a dose of arsenic on the spot, and get it over with fast. This way, she’s not only pushing herself into the grave, she feels guilty about it besides. I can’t do anything except warn her.”
“I can’t even do that,” I said. “She’s stopped listening to me at all and if I try to keep an eye on her she just laughs at me.”
“Keep after her as much as you can,” he said. “All you can do.”
Well, the roses bloomed and kept their blossoms and got heavier and richer as the summer went on, and by the end of August our garden was so lovely, I would have liked to die there myself. Charlotte was tired and lethargic all the time; she might come downstairs for an hour or so in the morning, but she spent most of her time in her room, looking down at the roses from her window and I suppose stuffing herself with the lavish gifts from her unknown friend. It was all I could do to coax her out into the air for five minutes, and of course in the end that was what finally did it.
We had had breakfast together, eating buckwheat cakes and country sausage and toast and Martha’s strawberry preserves, and the mail had been good—one invitation for me, to a dance; one subscription renewal and one dividend check for Charlotte—and I asked her if she’d like to spend half an hour in the garden, after being indoors so much.
“I don’t think so.” Charlotte shook her head. “I believe I’ll just go back to bed.”
“You haven’t seen the rock garden. You can’t see it from your window. And you’re not sick enough to stay in bed and pamper yourself; you’ve got to get outdoors more.”
Charlotte sighed. “I’m so tired,” she said. “I hate walking around or standing up.”
“Half an hour?” I asked.
She shrugged. “These days,” she said wearily, “it’s more trouble to resist. Ten minutes.”
I took her arm, because she had trouble walking, and we went together out into the garden, among the roses. I knew I was right, when she stopped at once and just touched a rose with one finger. “They’re lovely this year,” she said.
“Each summer they’re lovelier than the last. That’s one of the things about roses.”
She laughed. “You thinking that next summer they’ll be just as lovely without me?”
“I’ll plant some on your grave,” I said amiably. “Come and see the rock garden.”
We went slowly down the path beside the cottage, between the rows of roses, past Martha’s kitchen window, and she leaned out to say, “Good to see you outdoors at last,” and then we went around past the house down to the back, to the rock garden that Charlotte and I had built together, and which I had tended alone this summer. “You’ve been spending too much time on me” Charlotte said critically. “Look at those weeds.”
“I’ve been more concerned about you.” I gave her a little hug. “Next year—” I said.
“Anne,” she said as though she hadn’t expected to be saying anything, and was a little bit surprised, and even shocked, to hear her own voice saying this, “Anne, you know I’ve left you all of it?”
“Have you, Charlotte?”
“The house, and the money, and everything. I thought you knew.”
“I just think it’s silly to talk about it.”
“I suppose it is. I’ve been wondering if maybe they weren’t wrong, Nathan and this other fellow. If maybe I’m not going to—”
“Look out,” I shouted, “snake, Charlotte, look out!” I jumped away from her, screaming, “Martha, Martha, help, snake!”
Martha ran out, gasping, and killed the snake with a shovel, and Doctor West told me afterward that of course it was not a rattler, but only a milk snake.
“I feel so awful,” I told him, “I keep thinking of how we were standing there talking quietly, and if I had only kept my head…”
“You couldn’t know, of course,” he said.
“I guess I’m about as afraid of snakes as she was of spiders. But still… it was my job to take care of her. If I had only thought in time…”
“It was bound to happen sometime,” Doctor West said.
About the worst job Martha and I had was going over Charlotte’s clothes. There was still chocolate in some of the pockets, and in one pocket, in the sweater she was wearing that morning, I found another note, saying, “They’re just trying to leave you out. You better show them you can still be in the center of things.” It was the only one of those things that I hadn’t written left-handed, and I burned it.
ONE ORDINARY DAY, WITH PEANUTS
Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1955
MR. JOHN PHILIP JOHNSON shut his front door behind him and went down his front steps into the bright morning with a feeling that all was well with the world on this best of all days, and wasn’t the sun warm and good, and didn’t his shoes feel comfortable after the resoling, and he knew that he had undoubtedly chosen the very precise tie that belonged with the day and the sun and his comfortable feet, and, after all, wasn’t the world just a wonderful place? In spite of the fact that he was a small man, and though the tie was perhaps a shade vivid, Mr. Johnson radiated a feeling of well-being as he went down the steps and onto the dirty sidewalk, and he smiled at people who passed him, and some of them even smiled back. He stopped at the newsstand on the corner and bought his paper, saying, “Good morning” with real conviction to the man who sold him the paper and the two or three other people who were lucky enough to be buying papers when Mr. Johnson skipped up. He remembered to fill his pockets with candy and peanuts, and then he set out to get himself uptown. He stopped in a flower shop and bought a carnation for his buttonhole, and stopped almost immediately afterward to give the carnation to a small child in a carriage, who looked at him dumbly, and then smiled, and Mr. Johnson smiled, and the child’s mother looked at Mr. Johnson for a minute and then smiled, too.
When he had gone several blocks uptown, Mr. Johnson cut across the avenue and went along a side street, chosen at random; he did not follow the same route every morning, but preferred to pursue his eventful way in wide detours, more like a puppy than a man intent upon business. It happened this morning that halfway down the block a moving van was parked, and the furniture from an upstairs apartment stood half on the sidewalk, half on the steps, while an amused group of people loitered, examining the scratches on the tables and the worn spots on the chairs, and a harassed woman, trying to watch a young child and the movers and the furniture all at the same time, gave the clear impression of endeavoring to shelter her private life from the people staring at her belongings. Mr. Johnson stopped, and for a moment joined the crowd, then he came forward and, touching his hat civilly, said, “Perhaps I can keep an eye on your little boy for you?”
The woman turned and glared at him distrustfully, and Mr. Johnson added hastily, “We’ll sit right here on the steps.” He beckoned to the little boy, who hesitated and then responded agreeably to Mr. Johnson’s genial smile. Mr. Johnson took out a handful of peanuts from his pocket and sat on
the steps with the boy, who at first refused the peanuts on the grounds that his mother did not allow him to accept food from strangers; Mr. Johnson said that probably his mother had not intended peanuts to be included, since elephants at the circus ate them, and the boy considered, and then agreed solemnly. They sat on the steps cracking peanuts in a comradely fashion, and Mr. Johnson said, “So you’re moving?”
“Yep,” said the boy.
“Where you going?”
“Vermont.”
“Nice place. Plenty of snow there. Maple sugar, too; you like maple sugar?” Sure.
“Plenty of maple sugar in Vermont. You going to live on a farm?”
“Going to live with Grandpa.”
“Grandpa like peanuts?”
“Sure.”
“Ought to take him some,” said Mr. Johnson, reaching into his pocket. “Just you and Mommy going?”
“Yep.”
“Tell you what,” Mr. Johnson said. “You take some peanuts to eat on the train.”
The boy’s mother, after glancing at them frequently, had seemingly decided that Mr. Johnson was trustworthy, because she had devoted herself wholeheartedly to seeing that the movers did not—what movers rarely do, but every housewife believes they will—crack a leg from her good table, or set a kitchen chair down on a lamp. Most of the furniture was loaded by now, and she was deep in that nervous stage when she knew there was something she had forgotten to pack—hidden away in the back of a closet somewhere, or left at a neighbor’s and forgotten, or on the clothesline—and was trying to remember under stress what it was.
“This all, lady?” the chief mover said, completing her dismay.
Uncertainly, she nodded.
“Want to go on the truck with the furniture, sonny?” the mover asked the boy, and laughed. The boy laughed, too, and said to Mr. Johnson, “I guess I’ll have a good time at Vermont.”
“Fine time,” said Mr. Johnson, and stood up. “Have one more peanut before you go,” he said to the boy.
Just an Ordinary Day: Stories Page 38
