Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories of Shirley Jackson (32 page)

F
AMILY
M
AGICIAN

Woman’s Home Companion,
September 1949

N
ATURALLY
I
REMEMBER THE
summer Mallie was with us. That was the time I got to be captain of the Crocodile team and we beat the Nine-Man Wonders from Acacia Street. It was only three summers ago and we had moved to town the first of that year, so we were still pretty new. Mother was working herself nearly crazy trying to make the house and everything go smoothly for us kids. While Dad was alive she’d had a maid, but doing her own housework again was too much for her, I guess. And Dottie didn’t help much. She’d left forty or fifty boyfriends back in the town we moved away from, and when she wasn’t writing them letters she was upstairs bawling over their pictures, and worrying Mother about how they didn’t write. And I hadn’t got my pitching arm limbered up and the fellows around weren’t sure they’d even let me on the team. So there we were.

Anyway, one Saturday morning about the middle of May—it was a month or so before summer vacation started, too early for swimming and the fishing not much good—I came in from the backyard and there was a little old woman sitting in the kitchen. She was round and she had a pink face and she smiled up at me when I came in.

I said, “Hi,” just to be polite.

There was a row of what looked like cherry pies on the table, something smelled good on the stove, and the table was set, so I sort of smiled back at her and said, “When’s lunch?”

I found out later that the smile I thought she had on just for me was permanent—she never stopped smiling, far as I knew. She said, “Sit right down, son. You’re Jerry, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. I sat down in my place and she got up and took my plate and brought it back from the stove filled with a kind of stew that tasted fine.

“This is good,” I said. “Is that pie?”

“Cherry pie,” she said. “How many can you eat?”

“Two,” I said. Just then Mother and Dottie came into the kitchen. Mother looked even more worried than usual and Dottie looked as though she had been crying again.

“What’s the matter?” I asked Dottie, still being polite. “No letter from Dickie again today?”

“How
can
you?” Dottie said. All the time in those days when she talked to me she would raise her eyes and sigh, as though I were getting to be too much for her to bear.

Mother looked at me and at the strange little woman and said, “Dorothy, sit down and eat your lunch.”

“It’s pretty good,” I said. When the little woman brought Mother’s plate she said, “Now, Mrs. Livingston, I got everything for today figured out. You run along downtown this afternoon and go to a movie, maybe, or do some shopping. I do like to see a boy eat,” and she pulled my hair when she went around to get Dottie’s plate.

“I can’t eat a thing, thank you very much,” Dottie said. She sighed and looked out the window. “I’m really not hungry at all, thank you very much.”

“Nonsense,” the little woman said, which is just what I was thinking. She filled Dottie’s plate and after a minute, when no one seemed to be looking, Dottie took a tiny taste. Pretty soon she was eating as well as I was.

“How about some pie, pal?” I said to the little woman, and Mother said, “Really, Jerry!” like she always does, but the little woman said, “You call me Mallie, son, and keep a civil tongue in your head, you hear?” and she laughed and I laughed and the pie was swell.

“Reason I want you to run along early this afternoon,” Mallie said to Mother, “Jerry here has a practice game on.”

“Baseball team,” I explained.

“And Missy here,” Mallie said, waving at Dottie, “she’s going to have company.”

“Me?” Dottie said. She looked up with a forkful of stew halfway to her mouth. “Really, I can’t imagine…”

Mallie winked at me. “You think I give away secrets?” she said. “If I told you who he is, you wouldn’t be surprised.”

“He?” Dottie said. She put her fork down.

“He?” I said in a squeaky voice. “You don’t want to see any boys, Dottie. You run along to the movies and Mallie can send him home again when he comes.”

Dottie started to fold her napkin but Mallie said, “You have plenty of time, Missy. He can’t get here before three. You run upstairs and get your blue linen dress and I’ll iron it for you. And
you
get along,” she said to me, and gave me a swift spank as I reached over to pick up my mitt. She was pretty fresh, all this spanking and hair pulling and stuff, but I figured that was mighty good pie and I gave her a poke in the ribs as I went by and all the way out of the yard I could hear her laughing and Mother saying, “Jerry, really!”

Anyway, I got home about five. A couple of the fellows on the team were walking along with me and when we got to my house Mallie stuck her head out of the kitchen window and called us. She told us to be ready to catch, and started throwing fresh hot doughnuts out of the window. I made a neat high catch on the first one, and while we sat on the fence eating, they said they thought I ought to be on the team, a substitute at first, of course, but on the team anyway.

After a while I went inside. Mother had just come home and Dottie was following her upstairs saying, “And it’s the biggest dance of the year and I
can’t
wear that old white…”

“Listen to her,” I told Mallie.

“You keep your mouth still,” she said to me. “All I want
you
to do is run right out in the yard and catch me a ladybug.”

“What?” I said, gawking at her.

“A ladybug,” Mallie said. “You just lift your big feet and march out in that yard and catch me a ladybug.”

“A ladybug?” I said, and she aimed a wallop at me that would have knocked me through the wall if she hadn’t pulled it short. I ran but I put my head through the back door and said, “A ladybug?” and she said, “And some dandelions, if you can find any.”

I figured she was crazy but I hunted around until I found a couple of dandelions. One of them had a ladybug on it so I took them both in to Mallie and she said, “Fine. Now get me the box of starch in the pantry and if you see any wax bring it along.”

By this time I knew she was crazy. When I came back with the starch and a bottle of floor wax, Dottie and my mother were standing in the kitchen and Mallie was saying, “So we can fix up a party dress in no time.”

“But how?” Mother asked. Dottie was still all dressed up from the afternoon and every time anyone looked at her she giggled.

“I’m going to the spring dance,” she told me with a sweet smile. “Robert Dennison came by this afternoon and asked me to go.”

“He must be crazy,” I said.

I sat on the kitchen table and watched while Mallie sent Dottie upstairs for a bed sheet and Mother into the attic to dig out the blue taffeta curtains we had in the living room of our other house. While they were gone I asked Mallie, “Are you going to make a dress for Dottie?”

“That’s right,” she said. She had the starch and the wax and the dandelions and the ladybug on the table next to me and she was looking at them, figuring them out.

“Out of this stuff?” I said. “How?”

“Like making a pie,” she explained. “You just get all the things it’s made of and then you stir them together right.”

Dottie came back with the bed sheet as Mother came in with the curtains.

“Now
then,” Mallie said. She made Dottie take off her dress and stand there in her slip. Then she took the bed sheet and draped it around Dottie’s waist, so that it made a sort of skirt down to the floor in all directions. Not
much
like a skirt, though—it looked a lot like a sheet. Dottie stood there looking at Mother as though she didn’t know what to do. Mother was worried, too, and finally she said, “Really, Mallie, it’s not necessary—we can probably afford a new dress for Dorothy.”

“You just stop worrying,” Mallie said. “We can’t buy Dottie a dress and still have new slipcovers in the living room and that furniture looks pretty shabby. You leave things to me.” She took the curtains and fastened them around Dottie, so that soon all of them except one made an overskirt over the sheet, and the one left she pulled around Dottie’s shoulders to make a top for the dress. “There now,” she said. She stood back and stared at Dottie and poor Dottie certainly looked silly. She looked as if she were dressed up for Halloween. But she stood there, being a good sport the way she can, sometimes, and Mother and I just watched.

Mallie took the dandelions and fastened them on the neck of the dress. She sprinkled some of the floor wax on the skirt and a little starch on the bed sheet underneath that was like a petticoat. Finally she set the ladybug carefully on the bed sheet. Then she stood back and smiled and said, “You’ll look real nice in that.”

Mother couldn’t stand it any longer. She said, “Oh,
Mallie,”
and almost cried. And I thought it was pretty mean to take a girl who wanted a new dress and pin her up in curtains and then say she looked nice.

“My chicken in the oven!” Mallie said suddenly, and opened the oven door. “Thank goodness,” she said, lifting it out. “Missy, you take off all that stuff and get ready for dinner.”

Well, Mother just looked at Dottie and me hard, meaning we weren’t to say anything more, and Dottie got out of the curtains and sheets as fast as she could and we sat down to dinner. Even though the chicken was fine, we didn’t eat very much—we were all watching Mallie, who went along with her affairs singing to herself as though she had forgotten all about Dottie’s dress.

Mallie went home after dinner without saying any more about the dress. When we were sitting in the living room Mother said to Dottie, “Dear, please don’t worry about the dress. I think Mallie really thought she was helping, making a joke, perhaps.”

“Where did she come from?” I asked. “I just walked in at lunch-time and there she was.”

“That’s about the way she came,” Mother said. “I was waxing the living room floor this morning and I turned around and saw Mallie standing there in the doorway watching me. I was scared for a minute, but she
does
look harmless.”

I thought of Mallie’s round pink face and laughed.

“Anyway,” Mother said, “she wouldn’t answer any questions, but just said she had come to help. And she took the mop away from me. Have you noticed,” Mother asked, “that when Mallie says to do something you
do
it, without asking any questions?”

“Golly,” I said, thinking about the ladybug.

“Honestly”
Dottie said, “I couldn’t even
move
to take off that stuff she kept putting on me.
Honestly
, I was
shading.”

“She’s a good cook, though,” I put in.

“She seems to be a very kind and generous person,” Mother said. “It’s so hard to get anyone to help around a house these days that even if she is a bit eccentric…”

“It seems to me,” I said very thoughtfully, “that if Mallie has decided to keep on coming to help us, we can’t stop her. Not if she’s made up her mind, that is.”

“Stop her?” Dottie said. “Not likely.”

“What troubles me,” Mother said slowly, “is how she made those pies we had for lunch. When she came in and took the mop away from me I went upstairs to tell Dottie about her and it was only about fifteen minutes later that she called us down for lunch.”

“And there were the pies,” Dottie said.

“I’m not worrying about where they came from,” I said, “just as long as there are some more.”

Well, that was the situation when we went to bed that night. The next day was Sunday. About eight o’clock in the morning the doorbell rang and I answered it. It was a big box, special delivery, for Dottie, so I left it outside her door and went back to bed. Dottie woke me up about an hour later. I could hear Mother saying, “Good heavens,” over and over again. Dottie had opened the box and found a dress. It gave me a jolt when I saw it—it was a dress with a blue taffeta skirt and top, and around the neck were little gold buttons like dandelions, and under the skirt was a stiff white ruffled petticoat. And what really took my breath away was that all over the white petticoat were printed thousands of little red ladybugs.

Well, Dottie put it on and it looked pretty good, for a dress, and we all went tearing down to the kitchen. Dottie ran up and kissed Mallie. While Dottie and Mother were both talking at once and poking and pulling at the dress I asked Mallie, “How’d you do it?”

“Magic,” she said, and winked at me.

That was the only answer she’d give, no matter what we asked her about the dress. That was the only answer we
ever
got. There was no question about Mallie herself, though. She came back every day and about twice a week she made doughnuts and at least once a week she made pies—sometimes cherry, sometimes lemon meringue, sometimes apple. Dottie went off to her dance in her new dress and woke everybody up trying to tiptoe upstairs when she came in. And then she kept me awake all night, sitting on the foot of Mother’s bed in the next room, the two of them giggling like dopes.