Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories of Shirley Jackson (10 page)

“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.”

“But,” I began helplessly. I waved one arm at the kitchen, and the doorbell rang again. “What shall I do?” I said.

“I just
told
you what to do,” Mallie said sharply. “You run along and get dressed.”

Well, I already knew what to do when Mallie spoke like that. There was no further question of hesitation or disobedience. I found myself heading for the shower and the blue dress. Just as I closed the bedroom door, I heard Mallie’s voice saying, “… old friend of Dimity’s mother. Just stopped in to say hello.”

I confess frankly that I took an unreasonably long time over that shower. With anyone else, I suppose I could just have admitted honestly that I’d made a mess of things and talked big and then couldn’t perform, but with Hugh Talley, that sort of admission was harder. He’d never forget it, for one thing. And he’d never let
me
forget it, for another. I thought of Hugh Talley’s red face and complacent smile once when I was just ready to step out of the shower, and then I stepped back into the shower again and stayed there awhile longer. Go ahead, Dimity, I kept telling myself, go ahead, face up to it.

I felt somewhat better when I was dressed and had the smoke out of my hair and the flour out from under my fingernails. I felt a little bit cheerful—almost, as a matter of fact, as though someday, perhaps in ten years or so, living in some town maybe five hundred miles from Hugh Talley, this day might begin to seem less important to me, even, perhaps, funny.

I gathered all my pride together just inside the bedroom door, and I put my head as high as it would get with the stiff neck I had gotten from bending over that stove, and I straightened my shoulders, and finally I opened the door and I marched bravely out into the living room and up to Hugh Talley, where he was sitting in the only comfortable chair with his feet up on the hassock.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Hugh,” I said with my brave smile, “but as a matter of fact, I might just as well admit—”

“Dimity,” Mallie said sharply, “best run into the kitchen and look to that pie.”

“I might as well admit,” I went on, “that after all I said—”

“I looked in on it a minute ago,” Mallie said, “and it wants to come out of the oven right now.
Right
now,” she insisted, and then added sweetly, “Of course, that’s only what I think, of course. Dimity knows best.”

It began to sink into my mind, what she had said. I was so wound up for my courageous speech to Hugh Talley that it took a minute or so before I even realized that Mallie was speaking to me. Anyway, I turned around and looked at her and she gave me a prodigious wink, and waved toward the kitchen with her hand. Then, when I turned back to stare at Hugh Talley, I saw something I also had not noticed before. The little table in the living room was set for dinner for two. The tablecloth was shining, the glasses were glittering, the silverware was reflecting the light of the two tall candles set in the center of the table. It looked pretty.

Mallie said, “I’ve got to run along in a minute, but first I’d like to see how your pie came out, Dimity.”

It occurred to me, now, that she wanted me to go into the kitchen. So I went and she followed me. Hugh Talley said as we left, “Hope Dimity didn’t put on too much style for
me
. I wasn’t expecting much, you know.” And he laughed in an unpleasant sort of way.

I stood in the kitchen doorway. I could have sworn that when I left it a short time before there had been dirty dishes in the sink, flour on the floor, and no dinner worth speaking of in the stove. Now, however, the kitchen was spotless—a good deal cleaner, I blush to say, than it had ever been before. Everything had been put away. It seemed likely that the floor had been scrubbed.

“What?” I said—my usual intelligent remark when astonished.

“If you don’t shut your mouth soon,” Mallie said tartly, “I won’t be answerable for what falls into it.”

“But—” I said—another intelligent comment of mine.

“No time for silly questions,” Mallie said. “You listen to me, Dimity Baxter. For a while there I figured I’d let you work along on things yourself, and then come through and say right out you were wrong. But I’ll tell you something. I don’t like that young man in there one bit. First thing he says to me when he sits down, ‘Did Dimity really make this dinner herself?’ Now, I don’t call that fair at all, so I said to him, ‘She spent all afternoon in the kitchen,’ and of course
that
was true.” She looked me up and down reflectively. “Blue’s a good color for you,” she said, and then went on. “That’s the sort of young man you have to edge around the truth with. So don’t you tell him anything, you hear? And for heaven’s sake, get that pie out of the oven.”

I opened the oven and took out the pie, noticing dully as I did so that the meringue was perfect, and little flakes of the crust fell off the edges. “Pie,” I said.

“What else would it be if I called it a pie?” Mallie demanded. “Don’t you ever have that young man here for dinner again, you hear?”

“I won’t,” I told her fervently.

“I borrowed your piggy bank, by the way,” Mallie said.

“The piggy bank?” I said. “But there was only
six
—”

“Never you mind,” Mallie said. “Those lamb chops were a bad cut, anyway. Now, here’s a cookbook for you instead of that old one I threw out, and maybe someday I’ll run in and say hello again.”

Briefly, quickly, she kissed me on the cheek, a swift brush of soft old lips, and then the front door closed softly and I was standing in the middle of my clean kitchen with dinner smelling good and a cookbook in my hand.

“Hey!” It was Hugh Talley calling me from the living room. “When do we eat?”

I moved numbly toward the stove. I lifted the napkin off one of the dishes keeping warm; it was hot biscuits, light and brown and not like anything I had seen for quite a while. Another dish held the baked potatoes; a third dish held the chops. There was the pie. And there was, I discovered, a salad in the refrigerator.

There was nothing for me to do but start carrying it in to Hugh Talley, which I did.

Sitting at the table, Hugh Talley looked down comfortably at his plate. “Doesn’t look bad,” he said. He had taken three biscuits, remarking that they were probably like lead. He had taken a baked potato, with the comment that it looked a little bit hard. He had served himself two chops, noting as he did so that for a wonder they weren’t covered with some kind of fancy sauce. When he helped himself to salad, he observed that the salad dressing probably contained whipped cream. But he had supplied himself nicely just the same. I just sat and stared at my own plate; it certainly
looked
like food.

“You know,” Talley said with his mouth full, “these biscuits are really pretty good.” He swallowed, and gestured with the piece of biscuit still in his hand. He had plenty of butter on it, I noticed. “You know,” he said again, “I’ll bet there’s a trick or two about biscuits you haven’t caught on to yet. I bet you just use any old flour to make them—isn’t that so?” I nodded—what else could I do? “Well,” he said, consuming the piece of biscuit in his hand, “that’s allllll wrong. That’s the way all women cook. Just take any old flour and use it for everything. But now, you take a
real
cook—” He gestured largely, and ended his gesture over the plate of biscuits. He hesitated, and then took another. “You take a real cook,
he
knows about flour. Why, when I want to make biscuits I go to a special little flour place I know of, way downtown, and I say to them, ‘Listen,’ I say, ‘I don’t want any of your ordinary flour, I want that
special
flour you keep for Hugh Talley.’ And by golly, that’s what I get.”

“What’s
what you get?” I asked him, but he didn’t hear me.

“Same thing with applesauce,” Hugh Talley said. “You take applesauce—I bet you put cinnamon in it?” I nodded again; I supposed I did put cinnamon in it. “Well,” Talley said, “I guess about
everyone
puts cinnamon, or some such thing, in applesauce—but not Hugh Talley.” He shook his head violently and had another biscuit. “What you want to do—that is, what a
real
cook would do is get some of this special seasoning they have at a little place I know of; it’s not like cinnamon, exactly, has more of a flavor, you might say. I go down there whenever I want to make
real
applesauce, and I say to them—”

I tasted a biscuit. It tasted real and more than real; it tasted like biscuits I remembered from the time I was about twelve and eating was practically all I lived for. It tasted, as a matter of fact, perfectly fine.

“And you take chops,” Hugh Talley was going on; how he could eat so much and talk so much and do both together without stopping made me wonder For a minute, and the sweet thought that he might choke himself to death occurred to me. “Pork chops, you know,” he said, “you have to treat a good pork chop right or it just simply tastes like any other pork chop. Now,
I
always take
my
pork chops, and I marinate them. Now, most people will tell you that marinating pork chops is all wrong, but not Hugh Talley.” He shook his head positively. “The trouble is, most people think that by marinating pork chops I just mean simply marinating them, but no
real
cook would do
that
. Not,” he said, “to a pork chop. You want to take a special combination of French dressing—not the French dressing you
buy
, of course.” He stopped and looked at me aggressively, and I nodded again, because I was, by now, just nodding every time he stopped. “Naturally not,” he said. “So you take French dressing, and you add this special—”

Pork chops? I thought suddenly. Pork chops? I looked down at my plate, took a taste. I was certain that I had bought lamb chops. Then I remembered the lamb chops down on the sidewalk and Mallie saying “I borrowed your piggy bank, by the way.”

“Excuse me,” I said hastily. I ran into the kitchen; the piggy bank was gone and the six cents it had contained lay on the shelf.

“Where’s that lemon pie I heard so much about?” I heard Talley shouting from the dining room.

It didn’t seem possible, after the dinner he had put away, but I picked up the pie and started in with it. As I entered the room, he began again. “Now, you take lobster,” he said. “Most people, they don’t cook lobster right.” He watched approvingly while I brought over the pie. As I was about to set it down, he took a deep breath and began, “The trouble with women—”

I couldn’t help it. Nobody could have helped it. Even
Mallie
couldn’t have helped it, and I almost think she would have approved.

I thought it was terribly funny, and I’m afraid I began to laugh. Hugh Talley wiped the lemon pie off his face and glared at me. Then he stood up, brushing meringue From his sleeves and shaking crust off his hair, and he tried to catch his breath, and then, with his face red and his eyes glaring, he tried to think of something to say, something cutting enough, I suppose, to sound furious through a faceful of lemon pie.

“You—you—woman cook!” he shouted finally.

I heard the door slam behind him and I thought: small credit to me; I only threw the pie—Mallie baked it. And it seemed to me that perhaps Mallie had baked that pie for only one purpose, and that purpose had just been served.

I figured right then that there was one thing I really owed to Mallie and I’d better get started on it right away, and deal with the mess on the floor later. Anybody could clean up a mess, but Dimity Baxter was going to set herself out to learn to cook, and with no more nonsense about it, either.

I went into the kitchen and got the cookbook Mallie had left for me and came back and sat down in the comfortable chair Hugh Talley had so recently vacated. The cookbook was patterned in blue and white checks, and had “Dimity Baxter” written across the front in gold letters. Inside, on the flyleaf, it said “To Dimity from Mallie.” And it had positively the strangest table of contents I had ever seen. It started with “Dinner for Mr. Arthur Clyde Brookson,” a name I had never heard before, although, reading it, I said it over once or twice and liked the sound of it, oddly. Instructions for the dinner, which began on page one, started off: “Now, don’t you get all flustered, Dimity. No need to worry about
this
dinner—he’s going to like it, whatever you cook. Probably won’t eat anything, anyway, either of you.”