Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories of Shirley Jackson (15 page)

“I’d like to,” Mrs. Smith said shyly. “I can’t wait to see it.”

“Just get right in the car and take off—there’s no one cares what we do or when. We can stay there tonight—the electricity’s on, and the water—and we’ll be comfortable enough.”

“Fine,” Mrs. Smith said. “I don’t mind a little discomfort; after all, there will be plenty of time to fix things the way we like them.”

“And that way,” Mr. Smith said, as though talking to himself, “I can get started on the cellar first thing tomorrow morning.”

T
HE
H
ONEYMOON OF
M
RS
. S
MITH

(Version II)
The Mystery of the Murdered Bride

W
HEN SHE CAME INTO
the grocery she obviously interrupted a conversation about herself and her husband. The grocer leaning across the counter to speak confidentially to a customer straightened up abruptly and signaled at her with his eyes, so that the customer, in a fairly obvious attempt at dissimulation, looked stubbornly in the opposite direction for almost a minute before turning quickly to take one swift, eager look.

“Good morning,” she said.

“What’ll it be for you this morning?” he asked, his eyes moving to the right and left to insure that all present observed him speaking boldly to Mrs. Smith.

“I don’t need very much,” she said. “I may be going away over the weekend.”

A long sigh swept through the store; she had a clear sense of people moving closer, as though the dozen other customers, the grocer, the butcher, the clerks, were pressing against her, listening avidly.

“A small loaf of bread,” she said clearly. “A pint of milk. The smallest possible can of peas.”

“Not laying in much for the weekend,” the grocer said with satisfaction.

“I may be going away,” she said, and again there was that long breath of satisfaction. She thought: how silly of all of us—I’m not sure any more than
they
are, we all of us only suspect, and of course there won’t be any way of knowing for sure… but still it would be a shame to have all that food in the kitchen, and let it go to waste, just rotting there while…

“Coffee?” the grocer said. “Tea?”

“I’m going to get a pound of coffee,” she said, smiling at him. “After all, I like coffee. I can probably drink up a pound before…”

The anticipatory pause made her say quickly, “And I’ll want a quarter pound of butter, and I guess two lamb chops.”

The butcher, although he had been trying to pretend indifference, turned immediately to get the lamb chops, and he came the width of the store and set the small package on the counter before the grocer had finished adding up her order.

One good thing, she was thinking about all this—I never have to
wait
anywhere. It’s as though everyone knew I was in a hurry to get small things done. And I suppose no one really wants me around for very long, not after they’ve had their good look at me and gotten something to talk about.

When her groceries were all in a bag and the grocer was ready to hand it to her across the counter, he hesitated, as he had done several times before, as though he tried to gather courage to say something to her; she was aware of this, and knew fairly well what he wanted to say—listen, Mrs. Smith, it would start, we don’t want to make any trouble or anything, and of course it isn’t as though anyone around here was
sure
, but I guess you must know by now that it all looks mighty suspicious, and we just figured—with an inclusive glance around, for support from the butcher and the clerks—we all got talking, and we figured—well, we figured someone ought to say something to you about it. I guess people must have made this mistake before about you? Or your husband? Because of course no one likes to come right out and
say
a thing like that, when they could so easily be wrong. And of course the more everyone talks about this kind of thing, the harder it is to know whether you’re right or not…

The man in the liquor store had said substantially that to her, fumbling and letting his voice die away under her cool, inquiring stare. The man in the drugstore had begun to say it, and then, blushing, had concluded, “Well, it’s not
my
business, anyway.” The woman in the lending library, the landlady, had given her the nervous, appraising look, wondering if she knew, if anyone had told her, wondering if they dared, and had ended by treating her with extreme gentleness and a sweet forbearance, as they would have treated some uncomplaining, incurable invalid. She was different in their eyes, she was marked; if the dreadful fact were not true (and they all hoped it was), she was in a position of such incredible, extreme embarrassment that their solicitude was even more deserved. If the dreadful fact
were
true (and they all hoped it was), they had none of them, the landlady, the grocer, the clerks, the druggist, lived in vain, gone through their days without the supreme excitement of being close to and yet secure from an unbearable situation. If the dreadful fact
were
true (and they all hoped it was), Mrs. Smith was, for them, a salvation and a heroine, a fragile, lovely creature whose preservation was in hands other than theirs.

Some of this Mrs. Smith realized dimly as she walked back to her apartment with the bag of groceries. She, at least, was almost not in doubt; she had known almost certainly that the dreadful fact was true for three weeks and six days, since she had met it face-to-face on a bench facing the ocean.

“I hope you won’t think I’m rude,” Mr. Smith had said at that moment, “if I open a conversation by saying that it’s a lovely day.”

She thought he was incredibly daring, she thought he was unbelievably vulgar, but she did not think he was rude; it was a word ridiculous when applied to him.

“No,” she had said, recognizing him, “I don’t think you’re rude.”

If she had ever tried to phrase it to herself—it would hardly be possible to describe it to anyone else—she might have said, in the faintly clerical idiom she had learned so thoroughly, that she had been chosen for this, or that it was like being carried unresisting on the surface of a river which took her on inevitably into the sea. Or she might have said that, just as in her whole life before she had not questioned the decisions of her father but had done quietly as she was told, so it was a relief to know that there was now someone again to decide for her, and that her life, inevitable as it had been before, was now clear as well. Or she might have said—with a blush for a possible double meaning, that they, like all other married couples, were two halves of what was essentially one natural act.

“A man gets very lonesome, I think,” he had told her at dinner that night, in a restaurant near the sea, where even the napkins smelled of fish and the bare wood of the table had an indefinable salty grain, “a man alone needs to find himself some kind of company.” And then, as though the words had perhaps not been complimentary enough, he added hastily, “Except not everyone is lucky enough to meet a charming young lady like yourself.” She had smiled and simpered, by then fully aware of these preliminaries to her destiny.

Three weeks and six days later, turning to go in through the door of the shabby apartment house, she wondered briefly about the weekend ahead; she had been naturally reluctant to buy too much food, but then, if it turned out that she
should
be there, there would be no way to buy more food on Sunday; a restaurant, she thought, we will have to go to a restaurant—although they had not been together to a restaurant since that first dinner together since, even though they did not actually have to economize, they both felt soberly that the fairly large mutual bank account they now had ought not to be squandered unnecessarily, but should be kept as nearly intact as possible; they had not discussed this, but Mrs. Smith’s instinctive tactful respect for her husband’s methods led her to fall in with him silently in his routine of economy.

The three flights of stairs were narrow and high, and Mrs. Smith, with the immediate recognition of symbols she had inherited, had always had, potentially, and was now using almost exclusively, saw the eternal steps going up and up as an irrevocable design for her life; she had really no choice but to go up, wearily if she chose; if she turned and went down again, retracing laboriously the small progress she had made, she would merely have to go up another way, beginning, as she now almost realized, beginning again a search which could only, for her, have but one ending. “It happens to everybody,” she told herself consolingly as she climbed.

Pride would not allow her to make any concessions to her position, so she did not try particularly to walk silently on the second floor landing; for a minute, going on up the next flight, she thought she had got safely past, but then, almost as she reached her own door, the door on the second landing opened and Mrs. Jones called, piercingly and as though she had run from some back recess of her apartment to the door when she heard footsteps.

“Mrs. Smith, is that you?”

“Hello,” Mrs. Smith called back down the stairs.

“Wait a minute, I’m coming up.” The lock on Mrs. Jones’s door snapped, and the door closed. Mrs. Jones came hurriedly, still a little out of breath, down the landing and up the stairs to the third floor. “Thought I’d missed you,” she said on the stairs, and, “Good heavens, you look tired.”

It was part of the attitude that treated Mrs. Smith as a precious vessel. Her slightest deviation from the normal, in the course of more than a week, was noted and passed from gossip to gossip, a faint paling of her cheeks became the subject of nervous speculation, any change in her voice, a dullness of her eye, a disarrangement in her dress—these were what her neighbors lived on. Mrs. Smith had thought early in the week that a loud crash from her apartment would be the sweetest thing she could do for Mrs. Jones, but by now it no longer seemed important: Mrs. Jones could live as well on the most minute crumbs.

“Thought you’d never get home,” Mrs. Jones said. She followed Mrs. Smith into the bare little room which, with a small bedroom, a dirty kitchen, and a bath, was the honeymoon home of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Mrs. Jones took the package of groceries into the kitchen while Mrs. Smith hung up her coat in the closet; she had not bothered to unpack many things and the closet looked empty; there were two or three dresses and a light overcoat and extra suit of Mr. Smith’s; this was so obviously only a temporary home for them both, a stopping-place. Mrs. Smith did not regard her three dresses with regret, nor did she particularly admire the suits of Mr. Smith, although they were still a little unfamiliar to her, hung up next to her own clothes (as his underwear in the dresser, lying quietly beside her own); neither Mr. nor Mrs. Smith were of the abandoned sort who indulge recklessly in trousseaus or other loving detail for a preliminary purification.

“Well,” said Mrs. Jones, coming out of the kitchen,
“you
certainly aren’t planning to do much cooking this weekend.”

Privacy was not one of the blessings of Mrs. Smith’s position. “I thought I might be going away,” she said.

Again there was that soft, anticipatory moment; Mrs. Jones looked quickly, and then away, and then, sitting herself down firmly upon the meager couch, obviously decided to come to the point.

“Now, look, Mrs. Smith,” she began, and then interrupted herself. “Look, why this ‘Mrs.’ all the time? You call me Polly, and from now on I’ll call you Helen. All right?” She smiled, and Mrs. Smith, smiling back, thought, how do they find out your first name? “Well, now, look here, Helen,” Mrs. Jones went on, determined to establish her new familiarity immediately, “I think it’s time someone sat down and talked sensibly to you. I mean, you must know by now pretty well what people are saying.”

Here we are, Helen Smith was thinking, two women of the singular type woman, one standing uneasily and embarrassed in front of a window, wearing a brown dress and brown hair and brown shoes and differing in no essential respect from the other, sitting solidly and earnestly, wearing a green and pink flowered housedress and bedroom slippers—differing, actually in no essential, although we would both deny indignantly that we were the same person, seeking the same destiny. And we are about to enter into a conversation upon a fantastic subject.