Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories of Shirley Jackson (24 page)

M
Y
R
ECOLLECTIONS OF
S. B. F
AIRCHILD

T
WO AND A HALF
years ago my husband and I decided that for our fifteenth anniversary we would give ourselves a tape recorder. We believed that with a tape recorder we could preserve, permanently, the small, shrill voices of our children and, with the further record taken with the movie camera, preserve fond memories against the future. We thought sentimentally of sitting in an evening, gray, worn, palsied, and blessedly alone, watching as the projector reeled off endless series of pictures of our children dancing, swimming, shooting off fireworks, playing baseball, and taking their first faltering steps, and listening at the same time to their recorded voices reciting “The Night Before Christmas” and singing “Three Blind Mice.”

The glories of a tape recorder were suggested to us, first, by an ad in the Sunday paper, pointing out that a big store in New York where we had a charge account, was selling “reconditioned” tape recorders for ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents, a saving, the ad pointed out, of almost forty percent. Although we observed that ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents was as close to a hundred dollars as made no difference, and was surely an extravagantly large sum to be lavished on nothing but a fifteenth anniversary, we were seduced into believing that a hundred dollars was little enough, after all, to pay for the pleasure of hearing our children’s voices in years to come, when we sat in front of our home movie screen. I wrote to the store in New York, which was called Fairchild’s, and ordered the tape recorder, asking that the ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents be charged to our account.

Since we had already ordered, that month, some coin books for my husband and a box of chocolate apples, our monthly bill, which arrived some days before the tape recorder, was a hundred and eleven dollars and fifty-three cents. When the tape recorder arrived I had to pay three dollars and seventeen cents express charges. The tape recorder was in a kind of wooden crate, and when my husband came home he and our older son had to use hammers and a screwdriver to take apart the wooden crate and get the tape recorder out. Although there was a book of directions tucked inside the tape recorder, there was no tape, and while my husband and our son read the book of directions and examined the various pushbuttons and spools, I went into town to the music store and bought a package of tape recorder tape. It cost me five dollars and ninety-five cents, and the man in the music store, whom I have known for several years, was quite snippity about our buying a tape recorder from a store in New York instead of doing business through him.

All during dinner my husband and the children discussed the tape recorder, and after dinner the children retired to their bedrooms, where they practiced privately the several songs and recitations they planned to record on the tape recorder, so they could be safely stored away until the distant future day when their father and I could finally sit down for a few minutes and play over our memories. After the dinner dishes were done, we called all the children downstairs into the study and they waited, giggling and coughing nervously, while their father reread the book of directions and got the tape recorder ready to record. Everyone kept telling everyone else to be quiet. Our older son with his trumpet recorded one chorus of “Tin Roof Blues,” and the baby half whispered a little tuneless thing he greatly fancied, called “Riding with an Engineer.” Our younger daughter sang, loudly and with great attention to enunciation, a song about visiting a candy shop, and our older daughter chose to record a ballad she had learned from her grandfather, called “Your Baby Has Gone Down the Drainpipe (He Should Have Been Bathed in a Jug).” When we played back the tape, all the children were first astonished and then amused, and everyone wanted to record something else. My husband’s voice was on the tape saying that unless everyone was quiet he would not record anything at all, and my voice was on the tape saying that did everyone hear what Daddy just said? because the next child to snicker would leave the room.

We played our tape over several times, and quite a few times after that for people who dropped in, and the children asked to have it played for their friends, and we played it to their grandparents over the phone. We were quite pleased with our recording, and thought we would record more when the children, particularly the baby, had learned new numbers. However, one evening when we were playing the tape for some friends of ours who had dropped in for a bridge game (and that, as it turned out, was the evening when the nine of spades disappeared so unaccountably in the middle of the second rubber and has not come back yet) the tape machine gave a kind of agonized groan, sang “—has gone down the drain—” and stopped. My husband and our guests fussed over it for a while, but nothing could persuade it to sing another note.

The next day my husband and older son carried the tape recorder out to the car and I drove it into town to the music store. The man in the music store and one of his clerks carried it into their repair shop and I told them how we had been playing our tape and the machine had stopped. They promised to check it over and see if it needed oiling or some such thing, and the man in the music store said that since I had not bought it there he would have to charge me for the overhaul; if I had bought the machine from him, he explained, he could have fixed it free of charge under his regular service guarantee, but since I had bought it somewhere else I would have to pay a regular repair bill. I said that was all right, it was no more than I deserved for buying it from the store in New York, and the music man said he certainly hoped I had learned a good lesson.

About three days later he telephoned me and said he could not repair the tape recorder. It had clearly, he said, been sent out by mistake, a mistake which of course could not happen with a machine bought locally. The tape recorder had not only never been reconditioned, but it had been used to death and then either dropped from a great height or stomped on by an elephant. It was a miracle, he said, that we had been able to get any result out of it at all. The one partial tape we had made was surely all we were ever going to have from this machine. He would not undertake to repair the tape recorder; he and his mechanic had taken it apart, and they would now put it back together again the way they found it, but they would not try to repair it. He suggested that since it had clearly been sent out by the New York store in error—at least, he hoped it was an error, although if I had gotten a tape recorder from him I would have been
sure
that if he said it was reconditioned that
meant
it was reconditioned—since, then, it was some kind of mistake, I must send it back to New York and let them take care of it.

I drove into town and the man in the music store and his mechanic carried the tape recorder out and put it into the car and I brought it home and my husband and our older son carried it into the house and put it on the dining room table. When I told my husband what the man in the music store had said about the tape recorder he was highly indignant and said I must certainly send it back and write in a complaint besides.

We had dinner on the kitchen table because the tape recorder was on the dining room table, and after the dinner dishes were done I sat down and wrote a letter to Fairchild’s, explaining all that had happened, and stressing the conviction of the man in the music store that the machine had been sent out by mistake. I said that naturally we intended to send the tape recorder back, and what did Fairchild’s suggest? I received an immediate answer, signed S. B. Fairchild. He said that I must put the tape recorder back into the crate, and send it to them express prepaid, and he was sorry that we had not decided whether or not we really wanted a tape recorder before we ordered it, because constant return of merchandise was a nuisance to the purchaser and to the store. I wrote S. B. Fairchild and said that the tape recorder was broken, that I had already paid the express charges for the tape recorder coming, and that anyway I could not possibly get the tape recorder back into the original wooden crate because it had been wholly dismantled when we took the tape recorder out and the children had used the pieces of wood for a lion cage. S. B. Fairchild wrote back and said it was a standing policy of Fairchild’s not to pay express charges on return merchandise and if the tape recorder were not crated it could not be sent back. If I had thoughtlessly broken the original crate I must get a new crate. Fairchild’s, S. B. Fairchild pointed out, did not encourage customers who ordered merchandise wantonly and returned it heedlessly; this caused expense to both the customer and the store.

I wrote back that in our town handicraft is at a premium and the only way I could get a new crate was by paying to have one made, and that would cost me several dollars. S. B. Fairchild wrote back suggesting that I keep the tape recorder, then, since I had wanted it enough to order it in the first place.

S. B. Fairchild’s obvious conviction, that my eyes were bigger than my stomach, irritated me so much that I wrote back a fairly tart letter saying that the tape recorder was Fairchild’s responsibility and not mine, and that I personally no longer shared the sanguine opinion of the man in the music store, but felt that Fairchild’s had deliberately sent me a faulty tape recorder, figuring to make a profit on what they could rake off on crating and express charges. S. B. Fairchild, clearly misreading my letter from beginning to end, wrote back that the policy of a small profit on many items had been a foundation of the Fairchild Organization since 1863.

I was trying to think of a way to answer Fairchild’s letter, when a friend of ours called to say that they were driving down to New York at the end of the week, and could they do any errands for us? I said well, yes, they certainly could; would they mind taking a tape recorder back to Fairchild’s for us? After some hesitation my friend said well, she guessed they could and I said I would bring the tape recorder right over. My husband and our older son carried the tape recorder out to the car and I drove it over to my friend’s house and we got two men who were sanding the driveway to come and carry the tape recorder and put it in the luggage compartment of my friend’s car. I gave the two men who were sanding the driveway a dollar. By way of thanks to our friends for taking the tape recorder down to New York, I got their young son an electric clock-making set, which cost four ninety-five, and he made a nice electric clock and put it in his bedroom. We were able to give up the kitchen table and start having dinner in the dining room again.

Our friends were in New York for a week, and when they came back they brought me a receipt from Fairchild’s for the tape recorder. They had not been able to carry it any farther than a desk on the main floor of Fairchild’s, they said, although the department where articles were to be returned was on the ninth floor. They had not been, they said, equal to carrying the tape recorder up nine escalators. Consequently, they had left the tape recorder in charge of a floorwalker on the main floor, and had gotten a receipt from him for its return. The receipt said that the tape recorder had been returned to the repair shop, and when I said it was to have been returned for ever and ever, they explained that the only counters on the main floor where you could put anything down at all were the repair counter and the wrapping desk. They had not thought I would like having the tape recorder left at the wrapping desk, and in order to accept the tape recorder at all the floorwalker had had to give them a repair receipt, unless they could figure a way to get the tape recorder up the nine escalators to the desk on the ninth floor where things were returned. The floorwalker explained that as long as the tape recorder was just being carried aimlessly around the store by people with no official standing at Fairchild’s, it could be transported only by escalator, but as soon as he had formally accepted the tape recorder in Fairchild’s name he could put it right on the freight elevator. They said that the floorwalker said that all I needed to do was write to the store explaining the situation and everyone, the floorwalker said, would be satisfied.

I thanked our friends and read over the receipt, which said that a tape recorder had been accepted for repair. Then I wrote Fairchild’s a long and civil letter, recounting the scene of the return of the tape recorder, and stressing the floorwalker’s acceptance of full responsibility. I carefully copied out all the numbers on the receipt, and filed the receipt itself away in the box where I keep recipes and guarantees and the instructions for using the electric mixer.

Because we had in the meantime ordered from Fairchild’s a party dress for our younger daughter and a kitchen stool, our next monthly bill was for a hundred and thirty-two dollars and sixty-one cents. I was puzzled, and wrote Fairchild’s, asking why the returned tape recorder was still on our bill. I pointed out that I had written them two weeks before, explaining about the return of the tape recorder, and had naturally assumed that since I received no answer to my letter I would find the price of the tape recorder deducted from my bill.