Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories of Shirley Jackson (42 page)

T
HE
O
RDER OF
C
HARLOTTE’S
G
OING

Charm,
July 1954

I
ALWAYS USED TO
love June, and the roses, and the heat; I used to sit at the breakfast table and feel the warm, rich air coming in from the garden, and linger over my coffee just because it seemed somehow to make the days longer, and everything, all day, was easier when the weather was warm. I can remember that Charlotte felt the same way; sometimes at the breakfast table we would catch each other smiling. “I wish I could sleep all winter,” I said once, “and only wake up for June.”

“You’re wishing your life away,” Charlotte said.

That must have been early in the summer of Charlotte’s death; I cannot remember a time during her illness when that remark was not at the back of my mind. Wishing my life away, I might think, the roses heavy in the window beside me, and Charlotte just faintly more pale than the morning before; “You look well this morning,” I would say.

Charlotte would look over at me, and smile, and say, “Thanks so much, dear. And please either stop telling me or make it sound true.” Then we would both laugh, because neither of us took the notion of Charlotte’s dying very seriously; no one, I think we both felt, could just
die
, not in June with the roses out. We tried making a joke of it—only at first, of course—“Coffee?” I would say, giving the coffeepot a little shove in her direction, “It may be your last cup, you know.” Or she might remark, eyeing the pastries, “I feel that I have a right to the larger, since I shall so soon be deprived of earthly joys.” I believed then that if Charlotte ever did think she was dying, she rather enjoyed the idea—it was all but painless, at first, and more than anything else like a schoolgirl dream of Camille, you know; she felt reasonably well, sometimes better than others, but she knew she was dying only because Doctor West and Doctor Nathan said so, and it seemed so silly, after all, to let
them
decide.

Actually, she had all the pleasures of dying for that whole summer. Everyone knew about it, and they gave her the best of everything, and always found a chair for her at the garden parties, and someone was always sure to be there to fetch poor Charlotte a drink or to talk to poor Charlotte or to play up to poor Charlotte’s gallant attempts to tone down her part; she used to wink at me across the room and I might wander over and say amiably, “Well, Charlotte dear, dead yet?” and everyone would gasp and say “Shhh” and “Good
Lord,”
and Charlotte wouldn’t be able to keep from laughing, and of course
that
made everyone tell everyone else how courageous poor Charlotte was, and wasn’t it lucky she was taking it so well, when of course all the time she was just enjoying herself right up to the hilt, more than she ever did before she was dying.

Charlotte was, of course, several years older than I; she was my older cousin, and I was the one always left out when she and my sisters used to gather together at parties and whisper and giggle, but then, the way things turned out, Charlotte and I ended up together, after all. There was I, no money and no place to go, just out of college and a little bit frightened, and there was Charlotte, all the money in the family, and tired of paid companions and being alone, and we ran into each other one day in town, and had lunch together, and decided we’d try putting up with each other for a while, with the understanding, of course, that we could always quit if we couldn’t stand each other. Well, it was fourteen years now, and we’d fought our way through most of it, spending our winters quarreling in town and our summers quarreling out at the cottage, and both of us livelier and happier than we would have been any other way. Charlotte always wanted to die at the cottage, anyway, so we came out early that year, after she’d seen Nathan, in town, and he’d told her about her heart, and her blood pressure, and everyone had looked gravely at everyone else, and Nathan said to me, “Take very good care of her, Miss Baxter—she’s always taken good care of
you
.” Charlotte of course began to laugh when he said that, and that made poor old Nathan the first person to pat Charlotte on the shoulder and say she was taking it courageously. So we came out to the cottage early that summer, and I began wishing my life away, and then around the middle of June Charlotte got the first communication. We started right away calling them communications, right with that first one, because there wasn’t much else to call them without taking them too seriously.

The first one was in the morning mail, and addressed to Charlotte, of course. I used to be complacent about how all the mail I got meant something; Charlotte was the one who got all the bills and all the ads and all the begging letters, and anything I got was either a letter from someone or an invitation. Anyway, this first communication made Charlotte laugh. “Look at this thing,” she said, tossing it across the table to me, “someone’s gotten
some
wire crossed.”

It was an ordinary congratulatory card, and very ordinary indeed—vulgar, I would have called it, actually. It was full of painted pink roses and cupids and was sticky with sequins: “Best Wishes on Your Plighted Troth,” it read in pink letters, and there was a white satin bow.

“Golly,” I said, “you suppose it’s meant for Martha?”

“If Martha’s getting married, I want to know about it,” Charlotte said grimly, and she put her head back and yelled, “Martha!”

“Hon, cut it out,” I said. “You know you’re supposed to be an invalid. Let me do the yelling, if you won’t let me go and get her.”

“Martha?” Charlotte said over my shoulder. “You getting married?”

“Me?” Martha was a good solid country woman; she was the greatest glory of our summer life, and thinking about it, Martha—who had already tried it twice, anyway—would as soon think of getting married again as she would of putting tomatoes in a chowder. “You think I’m crazy?” Martha said.

“Look,” Charlotte said, holding out the card.
“I’m
not getting married, and neither is Anne.”

“Me neither,” Martha said. “So I guess that’s none of us.” She looked down at the card disdainfully, holding it far away so she could read it. “Look at that card,” she said, and handed it back delicately. “My,” she said, and made a face. “Could use it to trim a cake,” Martha said.

“I believe I’ll put it on the mantel,” Charlotte said.

“I’ll do it,” I said as Charlotte started to get up, and Martha winked at me. “Might as well let her,” Martha said to me, “neither of us can stop her doing
anything.”

“She’s supposed to be sick,” I said. “I’m supposed to be taking care of her, Doctor Nathan said so.”

“Hah,” said Martha. “You feel like coconut cake for lunch? That card put it in my mind.”

“Sure,” I said. “Plenty of frosting.”

The card stayed there on the mantel for about a week, but I don’t think Charlotte kept on finding it as funny as she thought she would. In the first place, just about all the jokes you could think of to make to an unmarried lady of forty-eight about her getting congratulations on her engagement either were made in the first twenty-four hours or were too indelicate to make, anyway, and in the second place, Charlotte and I had gotten sort of used to being spinsters, and never gave it much thought, and even talked about it sometimes, between ourselves, but having the card up there on the mantel sort of brought it to mind, somehow, and even made people think we
did
wonder a little about ourselves. Anyway, Charlotte took the card down and I imagine she burned it, because it wasn’t there by the time the second one came.

“This isn’t funny,” Charlotte said, passing it across the breakfast table to me. “You think it’s funny?”

It was covered with sequins, like the first one, and cupids and roses, only this one had a white satin heart in the center, and
it
said “Blessings on Your Nuptials.” It was like the first one also in that it was not signed; this time we both looked at the envelope and wondered where it had come from. “Two can’t be an accident,” Charlotte said. “Someone’s doing it on purpose.”

“Some kind of a misguided practical joke,” I said.

“Trying to cheer me up in my last hours?” Charlotte said. “Not quite the way to do it, I think.”

“Mailed locally, too,” I said. “Put down that cigarette. You’ve had one,” I added. “You’re not allowed
any
.”

“It’s not worth it,” Charlotte said, “I’d even rather live.”

“You can’t, now,” I told her. “All arrangements have been made. Mrs. Austin’s planning a luncheon for after the funeral.”

“You suppose Mrs. Austin…?” Charlotte wondered, regarding the envelope.

“Why on earth? It’s some fool who got caught in a joke in bad taste and won’t ever admit it now.”

The third card was done in pink ribbons, and read “Love to the New Arrival.” It amused no one very much. We decided that the envelopes had been addressed left-handed, and got everyone we knew trying left-handed stabs at writing Charlotte’s name, although we were sure by then we’d never know who sent them, because anyone who thought they were funny would have come out with it by that time, and in any case it’s easy to make a mess of trying to write left-handed. The next card, which I thought was probably the least happily chosen, was bright yellow, with puppies looking dolefully at one another, and on the front it said, “Sorry for Your Aches and Pains,” and inside there was a verse about being sorry she was sick, and hoping she’d be real well soon and back at play with the other boys and girls. “I don’t
like
these,” Charlotte said, handing me this last one, “they are beginning to frighten me.”

“Suppose I open the mail?” I said. “I know the writing by now, and I’ll just sort out any of these things and throw them away.”

Charlotte shrugged, and laughed a little. “I guess I’m curious,” she said, “I want to know what they’ll think of next.”

Well, then, of course, the next one did it. We both recognized the handwriting on the envelope and I came around the table to watch Charlotte open it and she tore open the flap and two live spiders skidded out and one ran along her hand and up her arm. I thought she was going right then—and I think it was the first time I ever took the doctor seriously—because she screamed and jumped up and kicked over her chair and slapped at her arm and said, “Get it away, get it
away
.” I stepped on one of the spiders and took the second one off her arm and squeezed it between my fingers; I’ve never done such a thing in my life, but for some reason this particular spider just made me sick.

I had to call Doctor West from the village, and he put Charlotte to bed and I told him about the cards and the spiders and he looked as sick as I felt and said, “I can only believe that someone thinks it’s funny. Horrible thing to do, though.”

“He probably didn’t know how she loathes insects,” I said. “They horrify her.”

He nodded. “She ought to take it a lot easier, though, Miss Baxter,” he said. “I tell you, I don’t know what your doctor in town saw fit to warn you against, but I’m not going to try to confuse you or make you feel better by hiding it in a lot of medical phrases; Miss Allison is in a dangerous condition, and it’s not going to take much—” He had to stop because Charlotte was calling me, and then even so he held my arm long enough to say, “Watch out for Martha’s cooking; those rich cakes and fried chicken are no good at all for Miss Allison. And of course see that she doesn’t get any more spiders in the mail.”

“I’ll open everything,” I told him. “Even if it’s a man-eating tiger in an envelope.”

“Good girl,” he said.

Well, of course Martha thought the only thing she could do to show how mad she was at whoever sent those spiders was to get to work and make brown-sugar pie and shrimp casserole for lunch, and when I sat there with my plate full and saw Charlotte’s tray with the cup of vegetable soup and glass of buttermilk, what could I do?

“This once,
only
,” I said, passing her over my shrimp casserole. “I won’t tell the doc. But from now on it’s whole wheat bread and beet greens.”

“Certainly,” she said, diving into the shrimp.

“And no cigarettes.”

“I don’t smoke,” she said virtuously. “Doctor’s orders.”

I told Martha not to put her homemade strawberry preserves on the breakfast table anymore, and to butter the toast in the kitchen, and to use one slim pat of butter for four slices of toast, and not to serve
more
than four slices of toast. I began ordering a coffee without caffeine, but Charlotte raised such a fuss, I had to go back to our regular brand, but I made Martha serve only hot water and lemon juice at dinner. I broke Martha’s heart by ruling out absolutely all baked goods and all fried foods and all spices, which, since it eliminated fried chicken and blueberry pie and lamb curry, got Martha’s cooking down to a kind of basic boiled codfish, with now and then a lamb chop for variety. Charlotte began losing weight, and I began dropping in to the kitchen after dinner to take a little of whatever Martha had prepared for herself. “If I didn’t know it was doing her good,” I told Martha, my mouth full of kidney stew, “I’d give it up right now. It’s making her suffer.”