The Big Read IV: Shirley Jackson's "My Life With R.H. Macy

The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson





My Life With R.H. Macy

Why did I do this? I looked up the title before reading, and found out that this one is autobiographical. This is clearly going to affect my reading of the story. True to my alma mater's method, I prefer to read a work on its own merits. No forwards, no prefaces, definitely no cliff's notes. Ah well, I can't close a door I've already opened. I did so because these readings are so short (that means there's still time to get the book from your library and catch up!) that I planned to read and blog at the same time. Indeed having just caught up with the last Big Read, I am grateful that this one has such short readings. I do have to think about them, though, perhaps longer than the time it takes to read them.

They gave us each a big book with R. H. Macy written on it, and inside this book were pads of little sheets saying (from left to right): "Comp. keep for ref. cust. d.a. no. or c.t. no. salesbook no. salescheck no. clerk no. dept. date M."

Immediately I thought of the old movie scene in which the clerk hired at the holidays can't write up the sales ticket so she has them sent C.O.D. Isn't that Auntie Mame? When she meets her Beauregard Burnside?

So this nameless woman...all the clerks are referred to as numbers...lasts only two days at Macy's. Her first day she received seven numbers, one number of which was a letter, K, for her cash-register drawer. Other numbers included her locker number, her time-clock number, her cash-register number, and her cash-register-drawer-key number. Her second day she gets a question that is beyond her knowledge, so she pretends to ring up the sale and pockets the money. She falls down the stairs, is told she could be reimbursed for her torn stocking, but it involves the mysterious abbreviations in the quote above, so she just buys some (for less than the pocketed money) and doesn't return for the third day.

The writing is so flat it's hard to gauge the attitude of the protagonist. She almost sounds like a 90s slacker. She had no answer for another customer as to where a certain book would be.

The customer went away, and I said to 13-2246 that her guess was as good as mine, anyway, and she stared at me and explained that philosophy, social sciences and Bertrand Russell were all kept in dictionaries.

It's all quite surreal, and seems like a good enough reason not to go back. We get these little hints she is rather playful about not keeping her new job. The story is just shy of four pages. She ends with this:

I wrote Macy's a long letter, and I signed it with all my numbers added together and divided by 11,700, which is the number of employees in Macy's. I wonder if they miss me.

That's funny. I wonder if the fictional letter was longer than the story itself. I also read that this was SJ's first published story. I wonder if she's already thinking about place as an extension of the self. If so, in this case the nameless clerk clearly rejected the self as confined by Macy's, and still has quite a bit of youthful defiance.

I have to say if I were just reading this book I think I would have given up by now. Because we are reading and writing about it, I am thinking more deeply about it than I otherwise might, so I'm catching subtle humor and shifts in characters that keep me wanting to read the next story.

Thanks on Thursday

Of course I am grateful that Barack Obama won the presidency. May he be safe and healthy and lead us and the world into a just and liberated age.

Tears of joy and gratitude hit me when I saw this:



What a jubilant crowd, what a place to be at that moment. I am grateful for feministing.com. Thanks to them, I know that even in Texas, 52% of women voted for Obama. See more here.

I am also grateful for the fall colors. While the weather that gave us such vivid reds and yellows is the same weather that has created prime allergy conditions for me, I still love the fall leaves. I can't recall more vivid colors in my life.

Some of those red trees have looked like otherworldly fire...especially at times of low sun, morning or evening.

The Big Read IV: Shirley Jackson's "The Villager"

The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson




The Villager

She went into Whelan's and sat at the counter, putting her copy of the Villager down on the counter next to her pocketbook and The Charterhouse of Parma, which she had read enthusiastically up to page fifty and only carried now for effect.

I must admit I haven't read that book, and had to look it up to find out what it was. Miss Clarence's reading of the novel is much like her life. She came to New York to dance, and now she stays as a secretary. What glamor she has is simply the fact that she still lives in New York. If she stops carrying around the novel that she never finished, perhaps she would need to face her unfinished life. The effect of her life would be lost.

Miss Clarence is looking at some furniture for sale. The owner stepped out, but invites her in with a note. Now more quickly I see, with home as extension of self, that Miss Clarence is invited in to try on someone else's life. She looks through their cupboards, their fridge, deduces they dine out. The young couple is moving. Artie is an artist.

A look at a book about dance put her in touch with her own past ambition. This young artist has his dreams before him, hers are behind her. Inhabiting his home, she inhabits his moment, and attempts the dance pose that no longer comes easily. Another furniture shopper knocks, and she poses as the owner, Mrs. Roberts. Once the other shopper leaves, she is "suddenly in a hurry."
She has come too close to the discordant understanding that she now can never inhabit the moment of the young artist. That is past for her. Best not to dwell too long there.

Now that is sad.

The Big Read IV: Shirley Jackson's "Like Mother Used to Make" and "Trial by Combat"

The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson




Like Mother Used to Make

"How much is butter?" David asked cautiously.
"Eighty-nine," the clerk said easily.
"Eighty-nine?" David frowned.
"That's what it is," the clerk said. He looked past David at the next customer.
"Quarter of a pound, please," David said. "And a half-dozen rolls."
Carrying his package home he thought, I really ought not to trade there any more; you'd think they'd know me well enough to be more courteous.

I don't think I'm going to like this guy at this point. As someone who provides customer service, I have no sympathy for someone who expects to be singled out of the crowd at a busy counter.

He proceeds to make dinner, lingering over his self-designed apartment, his painstakingly collected silverware. His neighbor Marcia is invited to dinner. He has her key, but she does not have his, and he likes it that way. Curious.

He leaves a note in her apartment to remind her. Her place is more like mine, with papers scattered, furniture that doesn't quite fit, dirty laundry, randomness. He would not like me.

Yet he does appear to like Marcia. He takes great care to make dinner for her. She breezes in and her liveliness spreads about in the room. He avoids her sprawled feet, but is pleased over her compliments of his food, and of his space. She is slightly abashed over the state of her own apartment, but easily moves on.

Mr. Harris arrives from her workplace, and she offers him coffee and pie, smoothly letting Mr. Harris believe it is her apartment, and her pie.

David's desire to be rid of Mr. Harris had slid imperceptibly into an urgency to be rid of them both; his clean house, his nice silver, were not meant as vehicles for the kind of fatuous banter Marcia and Mr. Harris were playing at together; almost roughly he took the coffee cup away from the arm Marcia stretched across the table, took it out to the kitchenette and came back and put his hand on Mr. Harris' cup.

Marcia pretends she'll do the dishes. Of course David couldn't abide her housekeeping methods: he washes them and put them in their places. The date and the usurper settled in. David backs away from telling him to live, backs away from claiming his home, prepares to leave.

"Lots of work to do," David said, much more genially than he intended, and Marcia smiled at him again as though they were conspirators and went over to the desk and said, "Don't forget your key."

He settles into Marcia's apartment, which makes him miserable, and because it is his nature, begins to clean it up.

Now I feel sorry for him, and now I have to wonder about those folks that create passive aggressive power plays with mere clerks. I wonder how long this pattern with Marcia has been going on. I think poor David missed his chance to claim his birthright.

Trial by Combat

When Emily Johnson came home one evening to her furnished room and found three of her best handkerchiefs missing from the dresser drawer, she was sure who had taken them and what to do.

I am immediately reminded of my first months at college. My roommate was the daughter of a doctor and from California. LA? We seemed to get along alright. She began the year with a fresh-faced purity, but she soon became more worldly and more fully a social butterfly. We both dabbled with smoking of both kinds. One of our first decisions together was to buy some cheap weed. It was harsh cheap stuff. (That's probably the only time in my life I personally bought some.) To support my dabbling, and indulge my pack rat attraction for shiny things, I bought a pack of 5 or 6 lighters. After a week or so, several of them were missing. At that time, I still wore makeup, sometimes. I could only wear hypoallergenic foundation, not all that expensive, but expensive to my wallet. That too disappeared.

I discovered the missing makeup as my ever more absent roommate happened to return home, and I loudly accused her of taking my things. She denied it. Who else could it have been? She insisted I had to be mistaken. No mistake. I was too poor not to know exactly what and how much I owned. Maybe as the daughter of a doctor she couldn't know that. She moved in with someone else. If I remember correctly, I heard of more incidents, that she ran up a tab on someone else's credit card. More emotional problems surfaced. She didn't last the year.

I didn't reflect on what to do. I found a problem, and I immediately addressed it. It took me years to find out such direct confrontation is just not allowed in certain cultures.

Emily Johnson thought carefully about how to deal with her petty thief. It would never occur to me to pretend to seek advice from the very person suspected. Now, years later, I've received the same kind of advice: for example, raise a work issue as though I don't know the answer, but just question, "How could that happen?"

She establishes a friendly connection, chatting about her neighbor's husband, her flowers. She learns to keep cut flowers fresh with aspirin. Now that, I did know. My grandma taught me that. She gets to the real reason for her visit.

... "It's so slight, she said, "but someone has been coming into my room."
Mrs. Allen looked up.
"I've been missing things," Emily went on, "like handkerchiefs and little inexpensive jewelry. Nothing important." ...
"I'm sorry to hear it," Mrs. Allen said.
"You see, I don't like to make trouble," Emily said.

Mrs. Allen informs her all the keys open all the doors in the house. How brazen. So was my roommate. It confused me that she seemed to think I could be mollified by a denial. More items are missing. How funny: cigarettes. You know, my memory is faulty after all these years, but a pack of cigarettes may also have been missing in my room too. Emily decides to fight fire with fire.

She was thinking, I just want to pretend it's my own room, so that if anyone comes I can say I was mistaken about the floor. ...Emily...pulled up the shade. Now that the room was light, she looked around. She had a sudden sense of unbearable intimacy with Mrs. Allen, and thought, This is the way she must feel in my room.

Emily finds her handkerchiefs. She is interrupted by Mrs. Allen. "She felt herself blushing and her hands were trembling." This is interesting. Intimacy. Violation. Blushing. Like David in the previous story, she is about to confront, but backs down. She pretends a headache, and that she was looking for aspirin.

"I'm so sorry," Mrs. Allen said. "But I'm glad you felt you knew me well enough."

Leila says Mrs. Allen wins. I'm not quite sure about that. Does someone win? Is there more like an uneasy understanding? A mutual recognition of intimacy through surreptitious occupation of each other's space? Now there's a thought...in these stories, the home is a reflection or extension of the person living there. Lacking other intimacies, these people gain some closeness to other humans through invasion of their space. When Emily glimpses the sexiness of that invasion, in a way she really has come to know Mrs. Allen well enough. It's hard to say. The story is deliberately short. We don't know where it goes from there. Could they develop a pattern like Marcia and Davie? Jackson seems to be hinting at the intimacy that comes from living close to others that is not spoken of. Is it then as sad as it seems to be, with David ousted from his apartment, Emily losing her unimportant things?

Yay!

While some people have taken pains to point out Barack Obama could not be considered the peace candidate, I suspect he made his plans sound more aggressive for the campaign.

It isn't just that this is a historic moment, our voting in a mixed race black candidate...everything I've heard Obama say tells me he could change the way politics is done in this country. Those of us voting for him, not simply against the past regime did so because he avoided divisive rhetoric and conducted a calm and rational campaign. We are so ready for reality-based thinking.

Several times I have heard him say this is about you, and it was clear he meant it. He knew, he knows, what the American people ask of him, and what we have done for him. I read that he had 5 million volunteers. I believe that is unprecedented. Also unprecedented is the multi-layered grassroots nature of his campaign. It had to be so, for him to overcome the many election blocks the Republicans were attempting in key states. People in some states, in Democratic precincts, waited in line for hours to vote. People were indeed turned away as not registered, even though they were. Despite particularly horrendous disenfranchisement in Pennsylvania and Virginia, Barack won there. I'm so happy my worst fears were wrong.

These are my favorite two sentences from his speech tonight. This is what leads me to believe his message of hope and change. So much of the truth has been stolen from us. He will give it back. Our wish for peaceful response has been stolen from us. With this attitude he may give that back too.

We know that the government cannot solve all our problems, but I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you especially when we disagree.

What an incredible difference that will make in this country and in the world.

The Big Read IV: Shirley Jackson's "The Intoxicated" and "The Daemon Lover"

The Lottery and Other Stories

by Shirley Jackson



The Intoxicated

I realized I needed to think about the time to get more from the story. This must have been written immediately post-WWII...copyright 1948. The intoxicated man at a dinner party talks to his host's daughter while she does her homework.

"I'm writing a paper on the future of the world," she said, and smiled. "It sounds silly, doesn't it? I think it's silly."
"Your party out front is talking about it. That's one reason I came out here." He could see her thinking that that was not at all the reason he came out here, and he said quickly, "What are you saying about the future of the world?"
"I don't really think it's got much future," she said, "at least the way we've got it now."

This leads into a conversation in which she messes with him, and you wonder, is she just messing with him, leading him deeper into a crevasse where the only future for him is a pile of rubble, or does she think in the future "the subways will crash through"? Does she really think that "Everything that makes the world like it is now will be gone. We'll have new rules and new ways of living." ?

The intoxicated man returns to the party, where he tells the others she is an interesting girl, to which her father says, "Kids nowadays." The conversation has either gone over the man's head, or he's been unsettled, coming away with the idea that she's working on her Latin homework. I wonder how much she's been referring to the A-Bomb, I wonder if this is the nascent beginnings of a beatnik.

The Daemon Lover

At the age of thirty-four, thirty on her license, a woman waits for Jamie, her fiance. She takes great care with the details. Once married, they will stay at her apartment. Everything must be perfect. Yet he doesn't show. She anxiously tries to track him down. She hasn't known him long enough to know exactly where she lives. Does he exist at all? Given the title, I think not. I wonder, am I missing something? Perhaps the story means to make a statement about the search for a man, the need to find identity through a man...so much so she creates one. He has a name, James Harris, but she does not. (Unless I missed it.)

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