Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories of Shirley Jackson (25 page)

Under pressure from the children, who wanted to hear themselves singing again, my husband and I bought a new tape recorder, considerably more expensive, from the man in the music store. It worked beautifully. We recorded our older son playing “Royal Garden Blues” on the trumpet, our younger daughter singing a fairly one-dimensional song about tulips and sunshine, our older daughter doing something called “Who Strangled Old Man Gratton (with a Wire)?” which she learned from her grandfather, and the baby singing “Riding with an Engineer.”

I ordered three boxes of initialed stationery and a box of expensive bath powder from Fairchild’s, and our next month’s bill was a hundred and sixty dollars and four cents. I wrote Fairchild’s asking why the tape recorder—returned, I pointed out, two months ago—was still not deducted from our bill, and received no answer. My husband, who had not been able to decide what to do the month before, concluded that ignoring the tape recorder was the best idea, and he sent Fairchild’s a check for sixty dollars and five cents, deducting the ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents for the tape recorder. Fairchild’s sent us a receipted bill, pointing out that there was a balance of ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents still due. Would we clear this off their books, they asked, or at least pay them part of it? I wrote back a letter saying “See Enclosed” and enclosing a copy of the letter I had written them before.

By now we had begun to perceive that the receipt signed by the floorwalker was a very precious paper, and I took it out of the box of recipes and gave it to my husband and he put it into his desk in the envelope where he kept the copy of our mortgage and the preliminary listings for his income tax statements. I wrote another department store in New York, one just as big as Fairchild’s, and opened an account
there
, ordering a toy train for the baby’s birthday and a new kind of pencil sharpener, so our next monthly bills included a bill for eight dollars and forty cents from the new department store, and a bill from Fairchild’s for ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents, with a little slip pasted on the bottom of the bill asking if we would PLEASE ignore the above account no longer. My husband wrote a check to pay the bill of the second department store and threw away the bill from Fairchild’s.

About three weeks later my husband and I went out one evening to play bridge and when we got home the baby-sitter told us, blushing, that there had been a telegram phoned in; she had taken a copy of it; the message, she said, edging toward the door, was on my husband’s desk. The telegram said that unless we paid our long overdue account at Fairchild’s Department Store the store would start legal proceedings, and it was signed S. B. Fairchild. The baby-sitter said nervously that it was
perfectly
all right, we didn’t need to pay her for tonight, because she knew what it was to run short of money and she hoped that everything was going to be all right. My husband, who was beginning to get a little purple in the face, took out his wallet with his hands shaking and insisted upon paying her double. I said it was fantastic, that we didn’t owe that store a cent, and she said of
course
we didn’t, and it was a shame that people like that would never even give you a little time to get the money together.

The next morning the baby-sitter’s mother called me to say sympathetically that under the circumstances she supposed I would want to cut down a little on my usual contribution to the School Band Booster Drive. When I went down to the store that afternoon the grocer said that he supposed I knew by now that some people were always thinking about money they had due them, but he wasn’t one of them, and if I wanted to let my bill go this month he wouldn’t say a word. The boy who delivers the afternoon paper wheeled his bike around and raced off before I could pay him his weekly thirty cents, calling back over his shoulder that it was all right, pay him when it was convenient.

Our mail the next morning included a letter from the baby-sitter’s uncle. I knew it was from her uncle because his picture was in the upper left-hand corner, smiling broadly and pointing a finger at the legend across the top of the page, which said “YES! I am a fellow who WANTS to lend you money! Your FINANCIAL worries are OVER, and I mean
OVER!”
Among our bills, which came a day or so later, were a bill from Fairchild’s for ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents and a bill from the telephone company with an item for one dollar and sixty-nine cents for a collect telegram from Fairchild’s. I called the telephone company and got the night supervisor and asked what on earth gave her the notion that the telephone company could charge me for a collect telegram from Fairchild’s, particularly when the telegram had been delivered without my authority to my baby-sitter. The night supervisor agreed that there was a certain injustice in expecting me to pay for such an offensive telegram, but said regretfully that she had no authority to take it off the bill; I must write to the credit manager, she said, and explain it to
him
. I asked why couldn’t I telephone him? and she said that they were not allowed to use the telephone to discuss company business.

The next month I got another letter from S. B. Fairchild saying that they had been patient long enough and I must pay my long overdue account ($99.99) by return mail or suffer the consequences. I wrote Fairchild another letter saying “See Enclosed,” enclosing a copy of my letter to the credit manager of the telephone company, refusing to pay charges of one dollar sixty-nine cents for a collect telegram incorrectly delivered. The next month we received a bill from Fairchild’s for ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents and a letter saying that my credit everywhere would be permanently impaired so long as I neglected this outstanding account, particularly if Fairchild’s had to send a collection agency after me. I also got another letter from the baby-sitter’s uncle asking me to “BRING your TROUBLES to SOMEONE who can
HELP!”

The next month Fairchild’s went back to the beginning and started all over again; we got the little slip of paper pasted on the bill, asking us please no longer to ignore the above account, and the month after that we got the collect telegram again; this time, fortunately, I answered the phone and refused the telegram peremptorily, since I was still corresponding with the credit manager of the telephone company over the dollar and sixty-nine cents for the first collect telegram. The following month S. B. Fairchild sent us the suffer-the-consequences letter again, and the month after that was the collection-agency one.

For our sixteenth anniversary I bought my husband a nice wallet from the second department store. The children were tired of listening to their own voices on tape, and were bothering us to get a color television set. Fairchild’s had an ad in the Sunday paper one week offering color television sets at almost thirty percent off. We told the children that they had to be patient, that color television sets did not grow on trees.

About two months later—we were in the suffer-the-consequences month again—I saw in the paper that Fairchild’s was closing out a particular line of garden chairs, which I wanted very much to buy. I wrote to them ordering three plaid-seated garden chairs, and a set of nesting wastebaskets, which had been in the same ad, and an ornamental pewter tray that I thought would be nice for my mother-in-law’s birthday, and a few days later I got a letter from S. B. Fairchild. All of the Fairchild Organization, he told me, was shocked, grieved, and revolted at my double-dealing and deceptive tactics. Was I, after all this time, unaware that I had an outstanding debit of ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents ($99.99) owing to Fairchild’s Department Store? Did I think I might cavalierly overlook this obligation, sacking the noble counter of Fairchild’s Department Store for merchandise for which I did not intend to pay? Indeed, no such wool was to be pulled over the eyes of S. B. Fairchild. Old and valued customer as I was, I had gone too far. My order had been cancelled by the hand of S. B. Fairchild himself; my account was closed. No nesting wastebaskets, no pewter tray, not one plaid-seated garden chair would be forthcoming from Fairchild’s until I was prepared to meet my natural obligations and remit in full the sum ($99.99) long overdue to Fairchild Department Stores.

I read the letter twice and then, in an exaltation of pure fury, went to the phone and put through a call, person to person, to Mr. S. B. Fairchild, of the Fairchild Department Store in New York. I waited, gripping the phone, while the phone rang at Fairchild’s, and then through the series of connections that took my call from the main switchboard to the switchboard on the eleventh floor, to the credit office line, to the telephone of the secretary, to the credit office, to the office of Mr. S. B. Fairchild, to the secretary of Mr. S. B. Fairchild, to the confidential assistant to Mr. S. B. Fairchild, to the confidential secretary of Mr. S. B. Fairchild. For a while it looked as if we were stopped dead at the confidential secretary to Mr. S. B. Fairchild, but then I said if I did not get Mr. S. B. Fairchild on my long-distance person-to-person call I would put the call through every ten minutes for the rest of the day, making every attempt to tie up all telephone lines to Fairchild’s Department Store. After a minute a busy-sounding man’s voice got on the phone and said, “Well? Well?”

I told him who I was and said that I was calling about my bill.

“If you’re calling about your bill you should be talking to Accounts Due,” Mr. Fairchild said. “I’m a very busy man.”

“I’m calling because you wrote me a letter,” I said.

“The Business Office—”

“I ordered a pewter tray and some nesting wastebaskets and three plaid-seated garden chairs and you said—”

“If you want to place an order you should be talking to Telephone Service,” Mr. Fairchild said. “I cannot be expected to personally handle all—”

“I want my pewter tray and my plaid-seated garden chairs.”

“Or else Personal Shoppers down on the main floor.”

“I refuse, I flatly and absolutely refuse, to pay my bill.”

“Why don’t I connect you with Complaints?” Mr. Fairchild said hopefully. “I’m a
very
busy man.”

“I answered an ad for a tape recorder—”

“All of that material goes to Ad Response. That is not
this
office.”

“But the tape recorder was broken.”

“Then you want Repairs, on the main floor near the Avenue entrance.”

“No. The tape recorder was no good. I didn’t want it.”

“Then why didn’t you send it back?”

“I
did
send it back. I sent it back nearly two years—”

“Then it’s Returns you want, on the ninth floor. I
cannot
see why all these petty problems are pushed up to
me;
I have enough to do without—”

“I have written you nineteen letters, and it has cost me, altogether, counting an electric clock-making set, nearly forty-five dollars not to get that tape recorder. Do you think there is any merchandise in your store worth forty-five dollars
not
to get?”

“Office Equipment,” said Mr. Fairchild, confused. “Eighth floor.”

“I insist on satisfaction,” I said.

“I am sorry,” he said with dignity. “Are you sure you have the right store?”

I hung up and sat down to write, once more, to Mr. Fairchild. I wrote—since it was the last time—a complete and detailed account of the entire transaction of the tape recorder. I enclosed a copy of the receipt, drawn to scale, and a note signed by the man in the music store stating that the tape recorder I had brought him to repair had clearly been sent out by mistake. I reordered the pewter tray, the nesting wastebaskets, and the plaid-seated garden chairs. I included the name and address of the friends who had brought the tape recorder to Fairchild’s, and finished with a paragraph telling about how my husband and I wanted to sit quietly in years to come and listen to the voices of our children. My letter covered three pages, and when I sealed it I felt that there was nothing that needed to be added to give Mr. Fairchild the whole picture on the tape recorder. I took the letter to the post office, and said that I wanted to send it by registered mail, to ensure that it should be delivered
only
to Mr. S. B. Fairchild, at the Fairchild Department Store. The postmaster suggested that I ask for a receipt on the letter, which must be signed by the person addressed and then returned to me, so I could be sure that only the person addressed had received the letter. I paid seventy-seven cents postage.

Two days later I got back my postal receipt. In the line reading Signature of Addressee someone had written in Fairchild Department Stores. In the line underneath, which my postmaster had crossed out, there was a signature reading Jane Kelly, sec’y. At the top of the receipt was stamped DELIVER TO ADDRESSEE ONLY and at the bottom of the receipt was stamped DELIVER TO ADDRESSEE ONLY. I took the receipt over to the postmaster and showed it to him, and he was surprised.

“That’s no way to run a post office,” he said.

“What should I do?” I asked him.

“Well.” He thought. “I guess we can’t get the letter back
now,”
he said. “This secretary, whatever her name is, the one who signed it down here,
she’s
got your letter now.”

“And Mr. Fairchild won’t get it?”

“Tell you what to do,” he said. “You got to turn in a complaint on this, see? So you write a letter to
me
, postmaster here, and I’ll send it on. Then you write another letter to this here Fairchild, and I think when they get your complaint in the post office department, well, they’ll let you send the second letter for nothing.”

I went home and wrote a letter explaining what had happened, and I addressed it to our local postmaster and then I took it down to the post office and put a three-cent stamp on it and handed it to him through the window, and he cancelled the stamp and opened the letter and read it and said that was fine, he would send it right on.

One week later—not quite two years since we had first ordered the tape recorder, since our seventeenth anniversary was still nearly a month off and I was getting my husband a sword cane—I went down to pick up the mail.