"The Lottery, and Other Stories"

[fiefoe]

Shirley Jackson isn't as scary as people make out her to be -- until the last segment of this story collection.

*The Intoxicated

• “I suppose you like parties,” she said. <> Dumbfounded, he sat staring into his empty coffee cup. He supposed he did like parties; her tone had been faintly surprised, as though next he were to declare for an arena with gladiators fighting wild beasts, or the solitary circular waltzing of a madman in a garden. I’m almost twice your age, my girl, he thought, but it’s not so long since I did homework too.
• “In my day,” he said, overemphasizing, “girls thought of nothing but cocktails and necking.” <> “That’s partly the trouble,” she answered him seriously. “If people had been really, honestly scared when you were young we wouldn’t be so badly off today.”
• “Each time we begin a chapter in Cæsar, I wonder if this won’t be the one we never finish. Maybe we in our Latin class will be the last people who ever read Cæsar.”

*The Daemon Lover

• A headache on her wedding day; she went and got the tin box of aspirin from the bathroom closet and slipped it into her blue pocketbook. She’d have to change to a brown pocketbook if she wore the print dress, and the only brown pocketbook she had was shabby.
• The blue dress was certainly decent, and clean, and fairly becoming, but she had worn it several times with Jamie, and there was nothing about it which made it special for a wedding day. The print dress was overly pretty, and new to Jamie, and yet wearing such a print this early in the year was certainly rushing the season.
• Looking at herself in the mirror she thought with revulsion, It’s as though I was trying to make myself look prettier than I am, just for him;
• her makeup was another delicate balance between looking as well as possible, and deceiving as little.
• yet she could not bear the thought of Jamie’s bringing to marriage anyone who looked haggard and lined. You’re thirty-four years old after all, she told herself cruelly in the bathroom mirror.
• There was nothing to eat in the apartment except the food she had carefully stocked up for their life beginning together: the unopened package of bacon, the dozen eggs in their box, the unopened bread and the unopened butter; they were for breakfast tomorrow.
• Can’t do anything more now, she thought, no sense trying to improve anything the last minute.
• Waking without preparation into the room of waiting and readiness, everything clean and untouched since ten o’clock, she was frightened, and felt an urgent need to hurry.
• And then thought, What a fool I’d look like. She had a quick picture of herself standing in a police station, saying, “Yes, we were going to be married today, but he didn’t come,” and the policemen, three or four of them standing around listening, looking at her, at the print dress, at her too-bright make-up, smiling at one another.
• I have more than this, more than you can see: talent, perhaps, and humor of a sort, and I’m a lady and I have pride and affection and delicacy and a certain clear view of life that might make a man satisfied and productive and happy; there’s more than you think when you look at me.”

*Like Mother Used To Make

• “You like it?” Marcia asked modestly. She looked up at David and smiled at him over Mr. Harris’ head. “I haven’t made but two, three pies before,” she said. <> David raised a hand to protest, but Mr. Harris turned to him and demanded, “Did you ever eat any better pie in your life?”
• David put the clean yellow cups and saucers back on the shelves—by now, Mr. Harris’ cup was unrecognizable; you could not tell, from the clean rows of cups, which one he had used or which one had been stained with Marcia’s lipstick or which one had held David’s coffee which he had finished in the kitchenette.
• David stood up. For a minute he thought he was going to say something that might start, “Mr. Harris, I’ll thank you to…” but what he actually said, finally, with both Marcia and Mr. Harris looking at him, was, “Guess I better be getting along, Marcia.”

*Trial By Combat
__ She had a sudden sense of unbearable intimacy with Mrs. Allen, and thought, This is the way she must feel in my room. Everything was neat and plain.
__What does she want me to say, Emily thought. What could she be waiting for with such a ladylike manner? “I came down,” Emily said, and hesitated. My voice is almost ladylike, too, she thought. “I had a terrible headache and I came down to borrow some aspirin,” she said quickly.

*The Villager
__Miss Clarence, in a mild resentment of the coal and coke company, had done her quiet apartment in shades of beige and off-white, and the thought of introducing any of this shiny maple frightened her. She had a quick picture of young Village characters, frequenters of bookshops, lounging on the maple furniture and drinking rum and coke, putting their glasses down anywhere.

*The Witch
__“Thank you,” the little boy said. “Did that man really cut his little sister up in pieces?” <> “He was just teasing,” the mother said, and added urgently, “Just teasing.”

*The Renegade

• With the word dog Mrs. Walpole, in the second before she answered, “Yes,” comprehended the innumerable aspects of owning a dog in the country (six dollars for spaying, the rude barking late at night, the watchful security of the dark shape sleeping on the rug beside the double-decker beds in the twins’ room, the inevitability of a dog in the house, as important as a stove, or a front porch, or a subscription to the local paper;
• “Good-bye,” Mrs. Walpole said, knowing that she was making a mistake in parting from this woman angrily; knowing that she should stay on the phone for an interminable apologetic conversation, try to beg her dog’s life back from this stupid inflexible woman who cared so much for her stupid chickens.
• They had not lived in the country town long enough for Mrs. Walpole to feel the disgrace of washing on Tuesday as mortal; they were still city folk and would probably always be city folk, people who owned a chicken-killing dog, people who washed on Tuesday, people who were not able to fend for themselves against the limited world of earth and food and weather that the country folk took so much for granted.
• The bright sunlight across Mrs. Nash’s kitchen doorway, the solid table bearing its plates of doughnuts, the pleasant smell of the frying, were all symbols somehow of Mrs. Nash’s safety, her confidence in a way of life and a security that had no traffic with chicken-killing, no city fears, an assurance and cleanliness so great that she was willing to bestow its overflow on the Walpoles, bring them doughnuts and overlook Mrs. Walpole’s dirty kitchen.
• Lady sat quietly by the stove until the children came in noisily for lunch, and then she leaped up and jumped on them, welcoming them as though they were the aliens and she the native to the house. Judy, pulling Lady’s ears, said, “Hello, Mom, do you know what Lady did? You’re a bad bad dog,” she said to Lady, “you’re going to get shot.”
• “But it’s loose,” Jack said. “Let me tell this part. It’s loose and you put it around Lady’s neck….” <> “And—” Judy put her hand on her throat and made a strangling noise. <> “Not yet,” Jack said. “Not yet, dopey. First you get a long long long long rope.”

*After You, My Dear Alphonse
__Mrs. Wilson lifted the plate of gingerbread off the table as Boyd was about to take another piece. “There are many little boys like you, Boyd, who would be very grateful for the clothes someone was kind enough to give them.” <> “Boyd will take them if you want him to, Mother,” Johnny said. <> “I didn’t mean to make you mad, Mrs. Wilson,” Boyd said. <> “Don’t think I’m angry, Boyd. I’m just disappointed in you, that’s all. Now let’s not say anything more about it.”

*Charles
__“What are they going to do about Charles, do you suppose?” Laurie’s father asked him. <> Laurie shrugged elaborately. “Throw him out of school, I guess,” he said.
__With the third week of kindergarten Charles was an institution in our family; the baby was being a Charles when she cried all afternoon; Laurie did a Charles when he filled his wagon full of mud and pulled it through the kitchen; even my husband, when he caught his elbow in the telephone cord and pulled telephone, ashtray, and a bowl of flowers off the table, said, after the first minute, “Looks like Charles.”
__“Charles?” she said. “We don’t have any Charles in the kindergarten.”

*Afternoon In Linen
__The little girl’s grandmother set her lips firmly in a tight, sweet smile. “Harriet dear,” she said, “even if we don’t want to play our little tunes, I think we ought to tell Mrs. Kator that music is not our forte. I think we ought to show her our really fine achievements in another line.
__“Harriet, I don’t believe you,” her grandmother said. <> Harriet looked at Howard, who was staring at her in admiration. “I copied it out of a book,” she said to him. “I found the book in the library one day.”

*Flower Garden

• “I hope I’m not making a nuisance of myself,” she said unexpectedly, turning to the other woman. “It’s just that I’ve been wanting to live here myself for so long.” Why did I say that, she wondered; it had been a very long time since young Mrs. Winning had said the first thing that came into her head.
• They all attended him to the door and came back to their work in silence. I’ve got to do something, Mrs. Winning was thinking, pretty soon they’ll stop coming to me first, they’ll tell someone else to speak to me. She looked up, found her mother-in-law looking at her, and they both looked down quickly.
• “Just about eight children,” Mrs. Burton said, with the loving carelessness mothers use in planning the birthday parties of their children.
• Mrs. Winning was thinking. Something bad has happened, somehow people think they know something about me that they won’t say, they all pretend it’s nothing, but this never happened to me before; I live with the Winnings, don’t I? “Really,” she said, putting the weight of the old Winning house into her voice, “why in the world would it bother me?”
• There was a quiet minute, and then Mrs. MacLane said, staring at the blue bowl on the coffee table, “What I wanted to ask you is, what on earth is gone wrong?” <> Mrs. Winning had been holding herself stiff in readiness for some such question, and when she said, “I don’t know what you mean,” she thought, I sound exactly like Mother Winning, and realized, I’m enjoying this, just as she would; and no matter what she thought of herself she was unable to keep from adding, “Is something wrong?”
• This is dreadful, Mrs. Winning thought, this is childish, this is complaining. People treat you as you treat them, she thought; she wanted desperately to go over and take Mrs. MacLane’s hand and ask her to come back and be one of the nice people again; but she only sat straighter in the chair and said, “I’m sure you must be mistaken. I’ve never heard anyone speak of it.”

*Dorothy And My Grandmother And The Sailors
__“He might have said he was a captain,” my grandmother said, “but he was a marine.” <> “A marine!” my mother said, looking over the side to see if the launch was there to take us back. “Get Oliver and tell him we’ve seen enough,” she said to my grandmother.
__We always had dinner in the Merry-Go-Round, where the food came along on a moving platform and you grabbed it as it went by.

*Colloquy
__“I don’t understand the way people live. It all used to be so simple. When I was a little girl I used to live in a world where a lot of other people lived too and they all lived together and things went along like that with no fuss.”

*Elizabeth

• Funny thing, she thought, a clerk in a drugstore, he gets up in the morning and eats and walks around and writes a play just like it was real, just like the rest of us, like me. “Fine,” she said.
• She opened the notebook to a blank page, copied out a paragraph from the manuscript, thinking, I can switch that around and make it a woman instead of a man; and she made another note, “make W., use any name but Helen,” which was the name of the woman in the story. Then she put the notebook away and set the manuscript to one side of her desk in order to swing up the panel of the desk that brought the typewriter upright.
• “Robbie,” Elizabeth said, and then stopped. Already, she thought, I don’t want to laugh at him any more; I wish I could feel all the time like I did a minute ago, not like this. She looked at him carefully, his red face and the thin greying hair, and the heavy shoulders above the table; he was holding his head back and his chin firm because he knew she was looking at him. He thinks I’m awed, she thought, he’s a man and he’s cowed me. “Let her stay,” Elizabeth said.
• Although she had been a fairly competent cook when she first came to New York, capable of frying chops and potatoes, in the many years since she had been near a real stove she had lost all her knowledge except the fudge-making play in which she indulged herself occasionally. Cooking was, like everything else she had known, a decent honest knowledge meant to make her a capable happy woman (“the way to a man’s heart,” her mother used to say soberly), which, with the rest of her daily life, had sunk to a miniature useful only as a novelty on rare occasions.

*Seven Types Of Ambiguity
__“This is a very interesting place,” the lady said, in the same soft voice she had used when she spoke before. She was middle-aged and nicely dressed; all her clothes were fairly new, but quiet and well planned for her age and air of shyness. The man was big and hearty-looking, his face reddened by the cold air and his big hands holding a pair of wool gloves uneasily.
__Mr. Harris began to note down the prices of the books, copying from the boy’s neat list. After the big man had written his name and address, he stood for a minute drumming his fingers on the desk, and then he said, “Can I have another look at that book?” <> “The Empson?” Mr. Harris said, looking up. <> “The one the boy was so interested in.”

*Pillar Of Salt

• “This is home for two weeks,” Brad said, and stretched. After the first few minutes they both went to the windows automatically; New York was below, as arranged, and the houses across the street were apartment houses filled with unknown people.
• they drank more than they would have at home and it left them strangely unaffected; their voices were louder and their words more extravagant; their gestures, on the other hand, were smaller, and they moved a finger where in New Hampshire they would have waved an arm.
• in ten minutes it was finished and the fire engines pulled away with an air of martyrdom for hauling out all their equipment to put out a ten-minute fire.
• The toys for the children filled her with dismay; they were so obviously for New York children: hideous little parodies of adult life, cash registers, tiny pushcarts with imitation fruit, telephones that really worked (as if there weren’t enough phones in New York that really worked),... She had a picture of small children in the city dressed like their parents, following along with a miniature mechanical civilization, toy cash registers in larger and larger sizes that eased them into the real thing, millions of clattering jerking small imitations that prepared them nicely for taking over the large useless toys their parents lived by.
• On Long Island, their hostess led them into a new piece of New York, a house filled with New York furniture as though on rubber bands, pulled this far, stretched taut, and ready to snap back to the city, to an apartment, as soon as the door was opened and the lease, fully paid, had expired.
• “I don’t think so,” the girl said. “I really need a policeman.” <> They go to the police for everything, Margaret thought, these people, these New York people, it’s as though they had selected a section of the population to act as problem-solvers, and so no matter what they want they look for a policeman.
• She led them over the dunes to a spot near a small inlet, where the dunes gave way abruptly to an intruding head of water. A leg was lying on the sand near the water, and the girl gestured at it and said, “There,” as though it were her own property and they had insisted on having a share.
• The nasty little tune was running through her head again, with its burden of suavity and expensive perfume. The houses across the street were silent and perhaps unoccupied at this time of day; she let her eyes move with the rhythm of the tune, from window to window along one floor. By gliding quickly across two windows, she could make one line of the tune fit one floor of windows, and then a quick breath and a drop down to the next floor; it had the same number of windows and the tune had the same number of beats, and then the next floor and the next. She stopped suddenly when it seemed to her that the windowsill she had just passed had soundlessly crumpled and fallen into fine sand; when she looked back it was there as before but then it seemed to be the windowsill above and to the right, and finally a corner of the roof.

*Men With Their Big Shoes
__ Although Mrs. Hart was unreasonably afraid of Mrs. Anderson, she had heard and read so much about how all housewives these days were intimidated by their domestic help that she was never surprised at first by her own timid uneasiness; Mrs. Anderson’s belligerent authority, moreover, seemed to follow naturally from a knowledge of canning and burnt-sugar gravy and setting yeast rolls out to rise.
__ “I wish,” Mrs. Hart began again, a quick fear touching her; her kind neighbors watching her beneath their friendliness, looking out quietly from behind curtains, watching Bill, perhaps? “I don’t think people ought to talk about other people,” she said desperately, “I mean, I don’t think it’s fair to say things when you can’t know for sure.”

*The Tooth

• “I’m not worrying,” she said. “I just feel as if I were all tooth. Nothing else.”
• The strange man was talking. <> “Even farther than Samarkand,” he was saying, “and the waves ringing on the shore like bells.”
• Her tooth, which had brought her here unerringly, seemed now the only part of her to have any identity. It seemed to have had its picture taken without her; it was the important creature which must be recorded and examined and gratified; she was only its unwilling vehicle, and only as such was she of interest to the dentist and the nurse, only as the bearer of her tooth was she worth their immediate and practised attention.
• Then she realized that at the wash-basin she was in the way of the women in a hurry so she dried her face quickly. It was when she stepped a little aside to let someone else get to the basin and stood up and glanced into the mirror that she realized with a slight stinging shock that she had no idea which face was hers!
• Somewhere between here and there was her bottle of codeine pills, upstairs on the floor of the ladies’ room she had left a little slip of paper headed “Extraction”; seven floors below, oblivious of the people who stepped sharply along the sidewalk, not noticing their occasional curious glances, her hand in Jim’s and her hair down on her shoulders, she ran barefoot through hot sand.

*The Lottery
__ “Me, I guess,” a woman said, and Mr. Summers turned to look at her. “Wife draws for her husband,” Mr. Summers said. “Don’t you have a grown boy to do it for you, Janey?” Although Mr. Summers and everyone else in the village knew the answer perfectly well, it was the business of the official of the lottery to ask such questions formally.
__ “There’s Don and Eva,” Mrs. Hutchinson yelled. “Make them take their chance!” <> “Daughters draw with their husbands’ families, Tessie,” Mr. Summers said gently. “You know that as well as anyone else.”