Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories of Shirley Jackson (34 page)

T
HE
W
ISHING
D
IME

Good Housekeeping,
September 1949

M
R
. H
OWARD
J. K
ENNEY
, trudging disconsolately, noticed the bright shine of a coin in the gutter and for a minute regarded it cynically, without attempting to pick it up. It was a dime, and Mr. Howard J. Kenney felt with some justice that one dime more or less would make very little difference in his life at present; this was the end of his second week of job-hunting. The two weeks’ salary with which he had been discharged had dwindled to an alarmingly small sum; his wife no longer tried to cover her worry with a brave smile; the whole world—or so it seemed to Mr. Kenney—saw them with a suspicious, no-credit eye. And so fate offered Mr. Kenney a dime, glittering brightly in the late afternoon sunlight. After a minute, Mr. Kenney shrugged, leaned over, and took up the dime. It felt light in his hand, and solid, but very small indeed. Mr. Kenney started to drop it into his pocket and then he thought suddenly: Always give away found money; brings luck. I could use some luck. He held the dime in his hand as he walked toward his home.

There were two little girls ahead of him, about half a block away. They were the only people on the street, and they were playing together solemnly. They were about eight years old, Mr. Kenney decided as he came nearer to them, and he thought drearily what a pleasant age eight must be—no responsibilities, no thought for the future, nothing but sunlight and games. When he came close to the little girls, they both looked up at him, watching him approach with grave, unselfconscious interest. One of them was wearing a pink dress, the other, a blue blouse and yellow skirt. They looked like pleasant, agreeable little girls, and Mr. Kenney smiled tentatively at them.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” said the little girl in pink.

“Here,” Mr. Kenney said. He held out the hand with the dime in it and took the hand of the little girl in pink. He put the dime into her hand, closed her fingers over it, and smiled again. “For luck,” he said, and walked on quickly.

For a minute, the girls were silent with surprise; Mr. Kenney felt them watching him walk away. Then, after a minute, one of them—probably the one in pink—called, “Thank you. Thank you very much for the dime.”

Mr. Kenney waved without looking around and walked on toward his home.

Behind him, the two little girls bent their heads over the dime, shining in the hand of the little girl in pink.

“Why’d he give it to us, do you think?” the little girl in pink, whose name was Nancy, asked the little girl in blue and yellow, whose name was Jill.

“I don’t know,” Jill said. “He just gave it to us.”

“He said it was for luck, though.”

“I wonder why he didn’t keep it if it was so lucky,” Jill said. She turned all the way around to stare down the street at Mr. Kenney, now far distant. “Ten cents,” she said. “That’s a lot of money.”

“What’ll we do with it?” Nancy asked.

“We could get two Popsicles for ten cents,” Jill said.

“Or two chocolate bars.”

“Or ice cream.”

Nancy was looking intently at the dime. “It doesn’t look like a regular dime, somehow,” she said. “Somehow it doesn’t look like a regular dime at
all”

Jill leaned over and looked at it. “It’s different, all right,” she said. “I don’t know
how
, but it’s most certainly different from a regular dime.”

“A regular dime’s thinner, maybe,” Nancy said. She bent her head far down, next to Jill’s, and the two of them looked wonderingly at the dime.

“Or maybe this is more silvery,” Jill said. “Anyway, it’s most certainly not a
regular
dime.”

They lifted their heads suddenly and stared at each other for a minute with lovely, credulous speculation. Then Jill said softly, “Nancy, do you suppose—”

“I’m almost
sure
of it,” Nancy said firmly. “It’s a
magic
dime.”

“A wishing dime,” Jill added. “For wishes.”

“That’s
why he said, ‘For luck,’” Nancy said.

“Three wishes,” Jill said.

Nancy closed her fingers tight around the dime. “Jill,” she said, “we’ve got to be very, very careful with this wishing dime. We’ve got to be
very
careful.”

“It’s not like ordinary wishing,” Jill agreed, “where you go on wishing and wishing and you know nothing’s going to happen because you don’t have something like a wishing dime.” She stopped for breath and then added, “This is very, very different.”

“We can’t just go around wishing for anything,” Nancy said.

Jill sat down abruptly on the sidewalk, putting her chin into her hands and setting her small mouth; she was thinking. “We could wish for a million dollars,” she said finally.

“We don’t need any more money,” Nancy pointed out. “We have a dime already.”

“A pony?”

“Where would we keep it?” Nancy objected. “There’s not room in your house, and I asked Mother to get us a baby brother and I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t let me have a pony,
too.”

“We could wish for all the candy in the world,” Jill said, “but then we’d be sick.”

They both thought soberly for a few minutes, sitting together on the sidewalk, Nancy with her fingers carefully closed over the dime.

“Christmas?” Jill suggested, but Nancy only shook her head. “Coming anyway,” she said briefly.

“Listen,” Jill said suddenly. “What we’ve got to do is let someone
else
make the first wish. Then we’ll find out how to do it.”

“We’ve got three wishes, after all,” Nancy said in agreement, “and we wouldn’t need more than one for ourselves. If we could even think of anything for one wish.”

“Besides,” Jill said, “there might be someone around who’s been looking and
looking
for a wishing dime because they had a terribly important wish to make.”

“We ought to go home, then,” Nancy said. “Maybe there’s someone in your family or someone in my family with a wish to make.”

They stood up and carefully brushed off their skirts. Then, moving busily along side by side, they went to the house where Jill lived with her mother and father and two older brothers.

“I don’t know who would be best to ask at my house,” Jill said uncertainly. “My brother George is out back painting the steps, but he’s so mean these days.”

Nancy looked at the house next door, where she lived with her mother and father and sister. “Sally’s on the porch,” she said. “You think we could ask
her?”

“Will she do it?” Jill asked.

“Sometimes she’s sort of funny,” Nancy said. “But we can ask her.”

They went up the walk to Nancy’s front gate and then to the porch steps. Nancy’s older sister Sally was swinging in the porch swing, holding a book; but when Nancy and Jill arrived, Sally was staring at Jill’s house next door.

“Sally,” Nancy said, and Sally jumped.

“You scare a person to death,” she said. She glanced once, nervously, at Jill’s house, and then said hastily, “I was just wondering when Mother was coming home.”

“She’s not at my house,” Jill said.

“I wasn’t looking at
your
house,” Sally said. “I was looking to see if I could see Mother coming down the street.”

Both Jill and Nancy had agreed that Sally was the prettiest girl they had ever seen. She was seventeen, and in high school, and she had curly hair that fell to her shoulders in pretty waves. Sally had brown eyes, and she crinkled up her nose whenever she smiled. Right now, however, she was frowning, and her nice mouth was twisted in discontent.

“I wonder when Mother’s coming home,” she said aimlessly. “Nothing to do around here.”

“Why don’t you go talk to my brother George?” Jill asked. “He’s out back, painting the steps.”

“I don’t really care to talk to George, thank you,” Sally said. She lifted her chin a little higher and shrugged her shoulders. “I’m not really interested in anything George has to say.”

“Mother said he had to paint the steps because he was so grouchy all day.”

“I’m not surprised,” Sally said. “I’m not at
all
surprised that your mother thinks George is grouchy. George is one of the grouchiest—”

“Listen, Sally,” Nancy said. “Will you make a wish for us on our magic dime?”

“He is
really
unbearable,” Sally said. “What’s a magic dime?”

Nancy showed Sally the magic dime, and she and Jill explained to Sally that there were three wishes attached to it, and it had been given them for luck, and Sally was to try the first wish.

“Heavens,” Sally said. “What on earth would I wish for?” Because she was really a very kind and charming girl, she smiled at Jill and Nancy and said with interest, “I couldn’t think of a thing to wish for.”

“That was our trouble, too,” Nancy said sadly.

“Well, let me see,” said Sally. She stared into space and tapped her fingers thoughtfully on the edge of the book.

“You could wish for George to finish painting and come over to see you,” Jill suggested.

“Well,
really”
Sally said. Her smile disappeared and again she looked very haughty indeed. “If you think I’d waste a wish on something like
that
—”

“Maybe we better ask someone else,” Nancy said.

“Well,” Sally said hesitantly, “if you really want me to wish for something. How do I do it?”

“I suppose,” Nancy said, “I
suppose
you just hold it in your hand.”

“And count to ten,” Jill said.

“And make my wish,” said Sally. She smiled again. “Do I have to tell what I wish?”

Jill and Nancy consulted each other with their eyes. “I think you can say it to yourself if you want to,” Nancy said.

“All right, then,” Sally said. She held out her hand, and Nancy put the dime into it.

“One, two, three, four,” Sally counted while Jill and Nancy watched her breathlessly. “Five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.” Then, eyes shut and a half smile on her face, she made her wish to herself. “There,” she said. She handed the dime to Nancy.

“Has anything happened?” Jill asked curiously.

“It hasn’t come true yet, if that’s what you mean,” Sally said. She glanced again, as if involuntarily, at Jill’s house next door. “We ought to give it a while, anyway.”

“You going to tell us what you wished?” Nancy asked.

Sally leaned against the pillows and sighed deeply. “Someday,” she said. “If it comes true.”

“It’ll come true,” Nancy said confidently. “It’s a wishing dime, isn’t it?”

“We ought to find someone else,” Jill said. “There are two more wishes left, and we’ve got to be careful with them.”

As the little girls started down the steps, Sally sighed again deeply. “Who you going to ask next?” she said.

“I don’t know,” Nancy said. “George, I guess.”

“Of all the people in the world!” Sally said. “Heaven only knows what
George
might wish for.” She sighed again and leaned her head on her hand.

“We’ll ask him anyway,” Jill said to Nancy as they went down the walk. “He might
want
to make a wish.”

George was at the back of Jill’s house. The can of paint he had been using stood on the top step, only half of which was painted. George sat on the unpainted bottom step, his fingers holding the brush idly and his handsome mouth set in a grim line.

“Hi,” he said gloomily as the little girls came around the corner of the house.

“He looks worse than Sally,” Jill said critically. “Doesn’t he, Nancy?”

“Sally looks pretty bad,” Nancy said. “But George looks pretty bad, too.”

“You’re a great pair to brighten a dreary afternoon,” George said. “Did you just come to cheer me up?”

“We want you to make a wish,” Jill said. “Sally did.”

“I don’t care what Sally—” George began, but Jill interrupted him.

“We got a wishing dime from a man going down the street,” she said. “He just gave it to us for luck, and Sally made a wish and we want you to make a wish, too.”

George asked, as if not able to stop himself in time, “What did Sally wish?”

“She wished you would come over and see her,” Jill said promptly.

“Right away this afternoon,” Nancy added.

“So we want you to make a wish, too,” Jill said.

“Wish?” George said. He stared at them vaguely. Then he stood up and put down the paintbrush. “Wish?” he said.

“Yes,” Jill said patiently. “Like Sally did. We want you to make a wish.”

“You wish for me,” George said. Suddenly, without warning, he began to run. With one leap he cleared the low hedge between Jill’s backyard and Nancy’s backyard, and Jill and Nancy could see him racing for the front porch, where Sally was sitting.

“They sure act funny, those two,” Jill said.

“Now we’ve got to find someone else,” Nancy said.

They went through Jill’s house, but no one was around. Then, outside again, they sat down to wait for someone to come along.