The Bird's Nest

by Shirley Jackson

  “I didn’t.”

  “You did. And I will not be lied to. Now,” said Aunt Morgen, rising and leaning terribly across the table, “I mean to hear, before you leave this house today, exactly what you think you’re getting away with. And the sooner,” said Aunt Morgen, “the better.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “It won’t do you any good. Where did you go?”

  “I didn’t go anywhere.”

  “Did you walk? Or was someone waiting for you?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Who? Who was waiting to meet you?”

  “No one. I didn’t do anything.”

  “Who was he?” Aunt Morgen slammed her hand down onto the table so that Elizabeth’s glass of milk rocked and spilled; the milk ran to the edge of the table and dripped onto the floor, and Elizabeth was afraid to move to find a cloth to wipe it up; she was afraid to do anything more than sit, avoiding Aunt Morgen’s eyes and twisting her hands under the table. “Who?” Aunt Morgen demanded.

  “No one.”

  Aunt Morgen opened her mouth, gasped, and took hold of the edge of the table with both hands. She closed her eyes tightly, shut her mouth, and stood, visibly calming herself.

  After a minute she opened her eyes and sat down, and spoke quietly. “Elizabeth,” she said, “I didn’t want to frighten you. I’m sorry I lost my temper. I realize that by yelling at you I’m doing more harm than good; suppose I try to explain.”

  “All right,” Elizabeth said. She looked quickly at the milk, and it was still running off onto the floor.

  “Look,” Aunt Morgen said persuasively, “you know that as your only guardian I feel a great deal of responsibility. After all,” she said with a friendly grin, “I was your age once, much as I hate to admit it, and I can remember how hard it is to feel that people are keeping an eye on you. You feel independent, and free, and sort of as though you don’t have to account to anybody for what you do. But please try to realize, kiddo, that as far as I’m concerned, you can go ahead and do whatever you please. I’m not a dragon, or one of your fidgety old maids who faints when she sees a man. I’m your same crazy aunt, and I may be an old maid but I bet there’s not much left can make me faint.” Aunt Morgen hesitated and then, obviously resisting a train of thought which threatened to carry her away, went on firmly, “What I’m trying to say is, you don’t need to sneak in and out, and be afraid of my finding out something you’re ashamed of. If there’s some fellow you want to see, and you think for some reason I might mind your seeing him, don’t you think you’d be smarter to have me mad at you for seeing him—which I certainly couldn’t do anything about—than to have me mad at you for sneaking around and hiding things behind my back—which I certainly can do something about, and you just watch me—and all things considered, doesn’t it seem as though you’d be better off out in the open?” Aunt Morgen ran out of breath, and stopped.

  “I guess so,” Elizabeth said.

  “Then, look, kiddo,” Aunt Morgen said gently, “suppose you just tell auntie what it’s all about. Believe me, nothing is going to happen to you. You’ve got a right to do what you please, and remember, I’m not going to scold you, because I always did what I pleased, and I can remember perfectly well how you feel.”

  “But I didn’t,” Elizabeth said. “I mean, I didn’t do anything.”

  “Suppose you didn’t do anything,” Aunt Morgen said reasonably, “that’s still no reason for not telling me, is it?” She laughed. “It’s if you did do something you ought to be scared,” she said.

  “But I mean I didn’t do anything.”

  “Then what did you do?” Aunt Morgen asked. “What on earth can you find to do at that hour of the night if you didn’t do anything?” She laughed again, and shook her head, bewildered. “What a hell of a way to talk,” she said. “Don’t you know any honest words?”

  “No.” Elizabeth thought. “I mean,” she said, “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Good lord,” Aunt Morgen said. “Good holy lord God almighty, I can’t say it again. Are there any words,” she asked delicately, “which might communicate with your dainty brain? I am trying to ask you precisely what occurred, and with whom, at one o’clock last night.”

  “Nothing,” said Elizabeth, twisting her hands.

  “I am by now completely convinced that it was nothing,” said Aunt Morgen fervently. “I am only astonished that he could have expected anything else. There must be people,” she said as though to herself, “like that in the world, but how does she find them? Who, then,” she continued to Elizabeth, “was this optimistic young man?”

  “No one,” said Elizabeth.

  “Blood from a stone,” said Aunt Morgen, “gold from sea water, fire from snow. You’re your mother’s own daughter, mud up to the neck.” She laughed, unexpectedly good-humored. “I don’t know why,” she said, still laughing, “I should believe that you would go out on a cold night to meet a young man. My own private guess, being you’re your mother’s daughter, is that you’d make a big mystery of going out to mail a letter, and hope someone would think the worst of it. Or to find a nickel you lost last week. And if it is some fellow,” she added, pointing jeeringly at Elizabeth, “I’ll bet your poor dear father’s fortune he isn’t fooled. You’re like your mother, kiddo, a cheat and a liar, and neither of you could ever get around me.”

  “But I didn’t,” Elizabeth said helplessly.

  “Of course you didn’t,” Aunt Morgen said. “Poor baby.” She rose and left the kitchen, and Elizabeth was finally able to get the dishcloth and wipe up the spilled milk.

  • • •

  There was still a gaping hole in her room at the museum, and it stayed just beyond her left elbow all day. In the morning mail, which included a letter asking the museum for a complete listing of the exhibits in the Insect Room, and a letter asking for a final decision upon an unparalleled collection of Navajo hammered silver, there was another letter for Elizabeth. “ha ha ha,” it read, “i know all about you dirty dirty lizzie and you cant get away from me and i wont ever leave you or tell you who i am ha ha ha.”

  Coming home that afternoon with the letter in her pocketbook Elizabeth stopped suddenly on the street between the bus stop and her aunt’s house. Someone, she thought distinctly, is writing letters to me.

  She put this letter also into the red valentine box which had held chocolates on her twelfth birthday, and opened and reread the other two. “i will catch you . . .” “She’s all I have . . .” “you cant get away from me . . .”

  “Well?” Aunt Morgen said after dinner. “You decided to give in?”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “You didn’t do anything,” Aunt Morgen said. “All right.” She looked coldly at Elizabeth. “You got another one of your phony backaches?”

  “Yes. I mean, I have my backache again. And my head aches.”

  “For all the sympathy you’ll get from me tonight,” Aunt Morgen said heavily. “How often you think you can get away with it?”

  • • •

  “And how is our poor head this morning?” Aunt Morgen inquired at breakfast.

  “A little better, thank you,” said Elizabeth, and then she saw Aunt Morgen’s face. “I’m sorry,” she said involuntarily.

  “Have a pleasant time?” Aunt Morgen asked. “Poor devil still hoping?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “You don’t know?” Aunt Morgen’s irony was heavy. “Surely, Elizabeth, even your mother—”

  “I didn’t.”

  “So you didn’t.” Aunt Morgen turned back to her coffee. “How do you feel?” she asked finally, grudgingly.

  “About the same, Aunt Morgen. My back hurts, and my head.”

  “You ought to see a doctor,” Aunt Morgen said, and then, standing abruptly, and slamming her hand on the table, “honest to God, kiddo, you o
ught to see a doctor!”

  • • •

  “. . . and i can do whatever i want and you cant do anything about it and i hate you dirty lizzie and youll be sorry you ever heard of me because now we both know youre a dirty dirty dirty . . .”

  • • •

  Elizabeth sat on her bed, counting her letters. Someone had written her lots of letters, she thought fondly, lots of letters; here were five. She kept them all in the red valentine box and every afternoon now, when she came home from work, she put the new one in and counted them over. The very feel of them was important, as though at last someone had found her out, someone close and dear, someone who wanted to watch her all the time; someone who writes letters to me, Elizabeth thought, touching the papers gently. The clock on the stair landing struck five, and reluctantly she began to gather the letters together, folding them neatly and putting them back into their envelopes. She would not like to have Aunt Morgen see her letters. They were all safely back in the box and she had put away the chair she stood on to put the box onto the shelf of her closet, when the door crashed open and Aunt Morgen came in. “Elizabeth,” she said, “kiddo, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” said Elizabeth.

  Aunt Morgen’s face was white, and she held tight to the doorknob. “I’ve been calling you,” she said. “I’ve been knocking on your door and calling you and outdoors looking for you and calling you and you didn’t answer.” She stopped for a minute, holding tight to the doorknob. “I’ve been calling you,” she said at last.

  “I’ve been right here. I was just getting ready for dinner.”

  “I thought you were—” Aunt Morgen stopped. Elizabeth looked at her anxiously, and saw that she was staring at the table by the bed. Turning, Elizabeth saw one of Aunt Morgen’s brandy bottles on the table. “Why did you put that in my room?” Elizabeth asked.

  Aunt Morgen let go of the doorknob and came toward Elizabeth. “God almighty,” she said, “you stink of the stuff.”

  “I don’t.” Elizabeth backed away; Aunt Morgen, unreasonably, frightened her. “Aunt Morgen, please let’s go have dinner.”

  “Mud.” Aunt Morgen took up the brandy bottle and held it to the light. “Dinner,” she said, and laughed shortly.

  “Please, Aunt Morgen, come downstairs.”

  “I,” said Aunt Morgen, “am going to my room.” Eyeing Elizabeth, she backed toward the door, the brandy bottle in her hand. “I think,” she said, her hand again on the doorknob, “that you are drunk.” And she slammed the door behind her.

  Perplexed, Elizabeth went over to sit on the bed. Poor Aunt Morgen, she thought, I had her brandy. Absently, she noticed that the bedside clock said a quarter past twelve.

  • • •

  “. . . i know all about it i know all about it i know all about it dirty dirty lizzie dirty dirty lizzie i know all about it . . .”

  • • •

  Because the next day there was proof to correct on the museum catalogue, Elizabeth, with her new letter safely in her pocketbook, did not leave the building until quarter past four, when the workmen were already engaged on the hidden structure of the building. As a result, she missed her usual bus home. When she finally came into the kitchen where Aunt Morgen sat drinking her brandy, Elizabeth saw first that Aunt Morgen had not eaten any dinner, and then she looked up into her aunt’s hard stare. Wordless, Elizabeth could only hold out placatingly the box of chocolates she suddenly discovered she was carrying.

  • • •

  Mr. and Mrs. Arrow fancied themselves as homey folk in a circle where all their acquaintance collected Indian masks, or read plays together of an evening, or accompanied one another on the sackbut; Mr. and Mrs. Arrow served sherry, and played bridge, and attended lectures together, and even listened to the radio. Mrs. Arrow was accustomed to deplore as extreme Aunt Morgen’s habit of going to the movies alone, and both Mr. and Mrs. Arrow felt that Elizabeth was allowed too much freedom; Mrs. Arrow had said as much, indeed, to Aunt Morgen when Elizabeth first went to work at the museum. “You allow that girl too much leeway, Morgen,” Mrs. Arrow had said, making no bones about the way she felt, “a girl like Elizabeth takes more watching than one of your . . . one of those . . . that is to say, Elizabeth, you know as well as I do, takes watching. Not that Elizabeth’s not normal.” Mrs. Arrow had stopped and lifted her eyes to heaven and spread her hands innocently, so that no one would ever believe that Mrs. Arrow meant to imply for a minute that Elizabeth was anything apart from normal, “I don’t mean that at all,” Mrs. Arrow explained earnestly. “What I mean is, Elizabeth is an unusually sensitive girl, and if she is going to go off by herself every day for long periods of time, it would be most judicious, Morgen, most wise of you, to check carefully that she is always among people of the most genteel sort. Of course,” Mrs. Arrow went on, nodding reassuringly, “over at the museum they’re mostly volunteer workers. I always think,” she finished, “that it’s so kind of them.”

  Mr. Arrow had at one decisive point of growth taken a set of singing lessons to improve his poise, and he was still very apt to sing when even very slightly invited to; Mr. Arrow customarily entertained guests with songs like “Give a Man a Horse He Can Ride,” and “The Road to Mandalay,” and Mrs. Arrow accompanied him on the piano, pedalling furiously and occasionally humming the easy parts; “For God’s sake,” Aunt Morgen said to Elizabeth, pressing her finger insistently upon the doorbell, “don’t ask Vergil to sing.”

  “All right,” Elizabeth said.

  “Ruth,” Aunt Morgen said, as the door opened, “how good to see you again.”

  “How are you, how are you,” said Mrs. Arrow, and Mr. Arrow, behind her in the hall and smiling largely, said “How are you? And here is Elizabeth, too; how are you, my dear?”

  Because the Arrows neither collected Indian masks nor patronized a decorator, they were forced to use ordinary pictures on their walls, and whenever Elizabeth thought of the Arrows’ home she remembered the bright reproductions of country gardens and placid smooth hills and sunsets; the Arrows also had an umbrella stand in their hallway, although both of them laughed about it and Mr. Arrow, in his faint deprecating way, said that after all it was the very best place to put wet umbrellas. When Elizabeth, coat neatly hung in the Arrows’ hall closet, sat in a great chair in the Arrows’ living room, with her hands folded correctly in her lap and Aunt Morgen spreading herself comfortably in just such another chair, and Mr. and Mrs. Arrow nervously together on the sofa, Elizabeth felt safe.

  The whole room partook somehow of the smooth hills and sunsets; the chair in which Elizabeth sat was soft and deep and upholstered in a kind of cloudy orange, her feet lay on a carpet in which a scarlet key design ran in and out and around a geometric floral affair in green and brown, and the wallpaper, pervading and emphasizing the room, and somehow the Arrows, presented the inadvertent viewer with alternate squares of blue and green, relieved almost haphazardly by touches of black. There was nothing of harmony, nothing of humor, in the Arrows’ way of life; there was everything of compromise and yet, comfortably, a kind of deep security in the unmistakable realization that all of this belonged without dispute to the Arrows, was unmovable and after a while almost tolerable, and was, beyond everything else, solid. Not even Aunt Morgen could deny the Arrows the reality of their living room, and when one met them at a lecture on reincarnation, or walking placidly together toward the park on a Sunday afternoon, or dining at the home of one of those odd people who always seemed to invite them, Mr. and Mrs. Arrow brought with them, and spread infectiously, an air of unfading wallpaper and practical carpeting, of ironclad and frequently unendurable mediocrity.

  From where she sat Elizabeth could see her own reflection in the polish of the grand piano, and sparks from her own face glancing off the cut glass bowl of wax fruit, and glitters when she moved her hand, flashing and glinting, from the gilt mirror over the marble mantel and the glass beads on the lampsha
de and Mr. Arrow’s cuff links and the painted jar on the table, kept always full of sugared almonds. Mr. Arrow was going to get them some sherry, Mrs. Arrow hoped they would take a chocolate, Mr. Arrow was willing to break the ice with a song, if anyone liked; Mrs. Arrow wondered if Elizabeth was not getting thin, and the lights danced on the glass of the picture where the roses and peonies were massed in the country garden. Elizabeth identified a disturbance; she was getting one of her headaches. She rubbed the back of her neck against the chair, and moved uneasily. The headache began, somehow, at the back of her head and progressed, creeping and fearful, down her back; Elizabeth thought of it as a live thing moving down her backbone, escaping from her head by the narrow avenue which was her neck, slipping onto and conquering her back, taking over her shoulders and finally settling, nestled in safety, in the small of her back, from which it could not be dislodged by any stretching or rubbing or rolling; to a large extent her rubbing the back of her neck was an attempt to cut off the path of this live pain; firm enough rubbing might make it turn back, discouraged, and keep only to her head; “—museum?” Mrs. Arrow asked her.

  “I beg your pardon?” Elizabeth said to Mrs. Arrow.

  “Are you well, Elizabeth?” Mrs. Arrow asked, peering. “Do you feel all right?”

  “I have a headache,” Elizabeth said.

  “Again?” Aunt Morgen asked.

  “It will go away,” Elizabeth said, sitting still. Mr. Arrow would bring her an aspirin, and thought he might better not sing until her poor head was better; Mr. Arrow remarked smilingly to Aunt Morgen that frequently the headtones of the human voice were most irritating to the sensitive membranes of the brain, although, of course, many people found it soothing to be sung to when their heads ached. Mrs. Arrow had a kind of headache pill which she had always found more efficacious than aspirin, and would be delighted to bring one to Elizabeth; Mrs. Arrow herself always took two of these pills, but felt that Elizabeth had better not at first venture more than one. Aunt Morgen thought that Elizabeth should have her eyes examined, because these headaches came so often, and Mr. Arrow told about the headaches he had had before he got his glasses. Mrs. Arrow said that she would be very happy to go and get Elizabeth one of her headache pills if Elizabeth thought it would help and Elizabeth said untruthfully that she felt better now, thank you. Because everyone was looking at her she picked up the glass of sherry which Mr. Arrow had poured for her, and sipped at it daintily, loathing the underneath bitter taste of it, and feeling her head swim sickeningly.