Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories of Shirley Jackson (19 page)

C
OME TO THE
F
AIR

A
FTER A GREAT DEAL
of most serious reflection, Miss Helen Spencer had decided that she was not going to the fair. “Granted,” she told herself reasonably as she sat over her lonely cup of tea at dinnertime, “granted that they need the money.
No
one could say that I didn’t want to spend the money for charity.
No
one,” she told the cat, who stared long at her, and then she bent to give one quick touch to his front paw. “It’s not that I grudge the money, not at all.” Having lost the cat’s attention, she addressed the teapot. “But what earthly sense is there in
my
going? I’d stand on the edge of the crowd, and say good evening to everyone, and laugh when everyone else was laughing, and buy myself an ice cream cone and maybe a balloon, and pretend I was having a wonderful time, and smile cheerfully at Mrs. Miller.” She lowered her eyes before the teapot’s steady regard. “And Dr. Atherton,” she said, “of course.” She broke off and sipped several times, very quickly, at her tea.

“Anyway,”
she went on to the African violet on the windowsill, “who is going to notice whether I’m there or not? He’ll be playing darts with Mrs. Miller and everyone will be having a good time and dancing on the green, so why should
I
go?
I
don’t play darts.” She thought for a minute and then, smiling ruefully at the sugar bowl, said, “Not that anyone ever
asks
me, of course.”

She sighed, and perhaps the sugar bowl and the teapot and the violet sighed with her, since they should have known perfectly well that Helen Spencer was very lonely and, often, very unhappy, with the poignant misery that comes to lonely people who long to be social and cannot, somehow, step naturally and unselfconsciously into some friendly group; Helen Spencer was a lovely woman, to whose care was entrusted the fifth grade of the local school; she had been born and grown up in this town, and people who had known her all her life very often said to one another, “She’s a
lovely
woman—I’ve often thought of asking her over for tea or something one of these days.” As a result, Helen rarely went anywhere, and from the moment the first posters had begun to appear on the village trees (“Village Fair, July 25, 7 P.M. Come one, come all”) she had known she would not go, as she followed her quiet daily round from home to school to post office to library to dinner alone with a faint miserable longing at the back of her mind, and perhaps even the faintest touch of self-pity.

Now, at six-thirty on the evening of the fair, with the first distant sounds of laughter and excitement coming from the wide lawn behind the courthouse, where the booths were almost set up, and the lights tested, and the bunting fluttering in the early evening breeze, Helen sat docilely at her coffee, pretending not to notice the untouched dinner before her. She thought sensibly, “I do believe I’ll do my nails and wash my hair and go right to bed and read a magazine. I can always,” she thought, “say I have a cold, if anyone should ask me. If anyone should ask me.”

Then, because she knew self-pity when she saw it, she shook her head violently, said, “How silly I am,” and got up, intending to set her uneaten dinner away in the refrigerator (“I’ll certainly be hungry later,” she thought) and told the cat, who stepped lithely between her ankles as she went toward the kitchen, “I’ll do a penance for feeling sorry for myself. If the phone
should
just possibly ring—” and she hesitated, plate in hand, glancing hopefully over her shoulder at the phone, which was defiantly silent—“if the phone rings, I will let it ring seven times before I answer it.” She reflected. “Six,” she said. “Six times before I answer.”

The phone rang then, briskly, and Helen tripped over the cat, caught the plate, set it down in a flying swoop on a chair, and answered before the phone had rung twice. “Yes?” she said. “Yes?”

“Helen, it’s Dorothy Brandon. Look, dear, you’ve
got
to help us.”

“I?”

“It’s Wilma Arthur’s mother. Oh, wouldn’t you
know
she’d have to do it today?”

“Do what?”

“Fall
downstairs
, of course. It’s such
horrible
luck.”

“Poor woman.”

“But couldn’t she have done it
tomorrow
? I mean, of course, yes, the poor woman, she broke her leg and of course we’re all
terribly
sorry, but of course look where that leaves us, and it’s
already
after six.”

“Six-thirty.”

“Six-thirty!”
Her voice rose to a wail. “And if
you
don’t do it, I just think I’ll go
crazy
—first it was that Williams boy forgetting to order the ice cream, and then the lights in the grab bag wouldn’t work, and then that
horrible
trombone player—”

“A horr—?”

“He went and had a baby, I mean his wife did, this afternoon, and we had to ask the Hot Rock Trio to come over from South Arlen, and then Mr. French got mad and said he wouldn’t play his musical saw if he had to compete with a jazz band, so by the time I got
him
smoothed down, then little Michael Willis was going to run the lemonade stand and his mother said because he threw a rock through the Perrins’ window—”

“But,” said Helen most practically, “I
can’t
repair the Perrins’ window, and when it comes to playing the trombone—”

“Helen, please
do
be sensible. All we want is—what?” she said to someone away from the phone. “What did you say? He did? Just now? What is the lemonade stand going to
do?
You tell them if I get my hands on that dog I’ll—Helen,” she said again into the phone, “I really don’t have time to
talk
. Just hurry right on over and don’t worry about a costume because we have loads of scarves and beads and stuff. But
hurry.”

“But what—” Helen began, and then realized that she was talking into an empty phone. “What?” she said vaguely to the cat, hanging up slowly, and the cat yawned widely, eyes shut. “I guess I’d better hurry, then,” Helen said, picking up her dinner plate and looking at it absently. “They
want
me,” she explained, and set the plate down before the cat, who looked at it, startled, and then began hastily to bite at the slice of cold chicken, eyeing Helen with disbelief. Then the door slammed shut behind her and the cat settled down comfortably, finishing off the chicken first, going on to the cottage cheese in the salad, even tasting delicately at the lettuce. When nothing remained on the plate but lettuce and a slice of pineapple, the cat abandoned it and leaped softly onto the table, where he finished off the cream in the pitcher, took a lick at the butter, and then moved gracefully down and into the overstuffed chair, primped himself briefly, and fell beautifully asleep.

Helen Spencer, racing down the street with a completely meaningless sense of urgency, and no hat, ran onto the fair grounds, panting, between wooden booths advertising fish ponds and grab bags, lemonade and hot dogs, pony rides and homemade fudge; she made her way, pushing, through the little groups of women and men and children who fussed around the booths, the early comers, the ladies who had baked the home-baked cakes and contributed the embroidered aprons and donated painted ashtrays to go into the grab bag, the children ducking away from grown-up hands, standing big-eyed before the baseball-throwing concession and the little train made of borrowed wagons hitched to a jeep.

“Helen,
hurry
—there’s a line waiting already.”

“But what?” said Helen breathlessly as Mrs. Brandon took her arm and led her firmly across the lawn. “Where?”

“Come
along
, we’ve got to get something for your
head.”

Helplessly Helen, realizing that she had forgotten to comb her hair, pattered along behind Mrs. Brandon, asking at intervals, “What?” or “Where?” They came up behind a row of booths, going carefully between cartons and boxes where additional supplies were kept, and finally Mrs. Brandon raised a curtain on the back of a booth and said, “Here, now, as soon as we can get you dressed you can start, because if we keep these people waiting any longer, heaven only
knows
what they’ll do, the Armstrong girl’s been here fifteen minutes
already!”

The booth held two chairs, one on either side of a bridge table, a heap of bright-colored cloths, and nothing else. “We just need to tie these around you, any old way,” Mrs. Brandon said, putting Helen forcibly down into one of the chairs and coming at her with a scarf of flaming scarlet, “and someone is going to bring some earrings and necklaces, but of course you can start without
those
. The Armstrong girl—” She stood off and looked at Helen, at the scarlet scarf wound around Helen’s head. “You look real nice in that color,” she said, “you ought to get a hat or something, let me see. Blue around your shoulders, and you’ll be sitting down, so there really isn’t any need for anything like a skirt or anything, we can throw this blue shawl over the table and that’ll hide you, and now, where did they put the cards?”

“Cards?”

“Wilma said they’d be right… here. Now, why don’t you just glance over them and I’ll run outside and check your sign and then I can tell the Armstrong girl to come right in.”

“Cards?” Helen said, appalled. Fingers shaking, she opened the deck of cards Mrs. Brandon handed her and stared at them in bewilderment. “But…” she said, but Mrs. Brandon had already gone and outside her voice said dimly, “And you can go on in, in just a minute, as soon as the Gypsy Queen is through—ah—communing with her spirits.”

“But I don’t know how—” Helen said, going to the front of the booth and parting the curtains, “Mrs. Brandon, I—” She broke off, looking back into the faces staring at her; in front of the booth was a waiting line that seemed to reach into the far distance, and, glancing down, Helen saw at her side an enormous sign, painted in bright reds and greens: “Madame Mystery. Knows All, Tells All, Reads the Future and Explains the Past. Fifty cents.”

“Oh, golly,” Helen said. Blindly, she made her way back to her chair and sat down, staring without comprehension at the deck of cards. As they spread out before her she saw one named “A sick person,” with a picture of an invalid in bed attended by a doctor and a nurse, one named “The ring,” picturing a bride and groom, one of a cupid, a broken mirror, a train, a house. Briefly, the thought of her quiet living room, her cat, her magazine, came across her mind, and if she had not been a person of good humor and good sense she might very well have tiptoed softly out through the back of the booth and fled home. In a small town, however, one does not unnecessarily leave the Mrs. Brandons marooned without a fortune-teller for their fairs, and Helen straightened her shoulders and tightened her lips, and called upon her memory and whatever good fairies were watching her, and said loudly, “Let the first seeker of truth come forward.”

The curtains at the front of the booth parted and the Armstrong girl came in, moving cautiously in the dim light. Since she was a high-school junior in the school building where Helen taught fifth grade, she recognized Helen and smiled a little, saying, “I never knew
you
could tell fortunes,” as she sat down. “I
love
having my fortune told,” she added unnecessarily.

Helen pondered in what she trusted was the identifiable gypsy manner, her hands on the cards and her head bent. (Armstrong; Sally, was it? Susie? Not too bright, anyway—hadn’t she failed geometry last year?—one of the cheerleaders, Helen rather thought; interested in that red-haired Watson boy.) “Choose a card,” Helen said finally with vast authority.

The Armstrong girl giggled, debated with her hand hovering over the cards, and pounced at last.
“This
one,” she said. Helen turned it over. “The clouds,” she said, regarding the stormy landscape pictured on the card. “Well.”

The feeling of being left out, of being always the one left alone at home, never regarded, never considered, never remembered, swept over her suddenly; here was a girl who would never, obviously, know that feeling, and, without thinking, Helen said, “You will never be lonely.
You’ll
never be hurt. The trouble in your life will be small.” (What troubles could she have, after all, a girl who couldn’t pass geometry but had a redheaded young man?) “The invitation,” Helen said, turning over the next card, “of course
you
know what
that
is?” The girl nodded, smiling. “You will have your wish about the invitation,” Helen said, “and it will be one of the happiest occasions of your life.” The girl leaned forward eagerly. “Will Mother let mego?” she asked, breathless. With great solemnity Helen turned over another card. “The stone wall,” she said. “Well, you will be allowed to go, I think, but only because your mother knows that she can trust you to behave yourself and do as you are told. If you should disobey—come home late, or something—” She turned over another card. “The lightning. Well, you can count on getting into all kinds of trouble.
Serious
trouble,” she said, raising her head to regard the girl ominously.
“Terrible
trouble.”