The Letters of Shirley Jackson

by Shirley Jackson

  emma just put lunch on the table. so goodbye.

  love,

  s.

  • • •

  [To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]

  [June–July 1950]

  dearest mother and pop,

  the dishes are still in the sink, stanley’s pants are not sewn where he ripped them, the animals are still unfed and so, in my usual fashion, i sit down to write you a letter. i have had a rotten cold—as we all have—and so have not felt much like writing until now.

  emma is no longer with us. i thought it was too good to be true. it was very odd, emma’s leaving, and will make a splendid story for good housekeeping: at four a.m. one morning i woke up to find emma standing by my bed, whispering that she wanted to show me something; i followed her downstairs and she informed me that there was a little girl in her room playing with a bluebird. the little girl, she said, had been sticking pins in her, and the Other People—not specified—were all standing outside listening. i woke up very fast, said “What? What?” and raced upstairs and shook stanley, who opened one eye and said i was dreaming. so i went back downstairs to see if i had been dreaming and there was emma; she said she was looking for the little girl who had lost her jacket and anyway the little girl had no right to come into emma’s bible class and ask silly questions. i said she certainly did not, and raced upstairs again, kicked stanley and said no, i had not been dreaming, and dragged him out of bed and downstairs in his bathrobe. he marched bravely up to emma (this still about four in the morning, pitch-dark, in the kitchen) and said “now, now, what’s all this?” so emma told him about the little girl and then looked at him and giggled and said “i bet you think i’m crazy!” so stanley said no, no, nothing of the sort, of course not and went and hid in the study. we finally decided that we had better get emma home to her mother, so i called her poor mother and woke her up and said briefly that i was sending emma home, but fast. i gave the poor woman no explanation, because emma was listening and i couldn’t think of how to say i thought she was loony. so we put her into a taxi and sent her home, but only after i had spent about an hour patting her hand and telling her everything was fine. all three children were very fond of her, and so were we, but the whole performance was enough to make me feel very jittery for a few days afterwards. the one thing i was sure of, all the time she was talking, was that she was not feeling the least bit violent, but was as fond of all of us as ever, even though she was out of her mind. at any rate, right after emma left i called the woman who had sent her to me and described the whole scene quite vividly, and she nearly fainted, and said she had never heard of such a thing with emma, that emma was the most wonderful girl she had ever known, and was i sure? and i told her all about it, and she was terribly upset, and called emma’s mother, who still works for her, and the result was that emma’s husband had called her a few days before and said he was leaving her because he found someone younger and prettier, and he didn’t want to hear from emma ever again, and emma (who had been home on her day off all the next day) had decided that the way to calm herself down was to polish off a bottle of whisky all alone; she had come back here late that night and had been drinking until she woke me about four. so that it was a combination of mental distress and drink and, aside from the scare it gave me, not very serious.

  at any rate, that is the end of emma. so i’ve gone back temporarily to the housework, and don’t mind it anywhere near so much as i did before. mostly that’s because it’s summer now, and there just isn’t so much to do. i am feeling very ambitious about the cooking, and keep making cakes and such. i don’t want to get anybody else at all, even for the cleaning, for a while, because the whole operation left me very nervous, and i haven’t been able to bring myself to leave the kids with a baby minder; the two times i’ve been out since emma left, i’ve gotten stanley’s aunt from new york to take care of things.

  however, to prove in addition that i am still working, i sent off the first third of my new novel*6 to the publishers last week, and got an enthusiastic call from them yesterday, saying it was terrific, but not commenting on the additional information forwarded to them by my agent, that we expect a five thousand buck advance. we’ll take four, we figure, and can be talked into three, but it will take a lot of talking…we had dinner in new york with a guy who is an independent movie producer in new york, who desperately wanted me to write movies for him. we are to get together again and see if it looks at all possible, although i am sure it will not, since i don’t see myself writing movies, somehow.

  lottery was on television last week, and pretty lousy it looked, too. i was horribly embarrassed; we were supposed to see it from the private viewing room at nbc, but decided not to at the last minute, and were so thankful that we had not. time magazine called me the next day to ask if i had written the television version and i told them no and they said then did i have a comment on it and i couldn’t think of anything to say and mumbled something into the phone and they said thanks so much and heaven knows what they thought i said. so i have now been interviewed twice by time, and if i had a subscription i would cancel it. i can look forward to another time interview about next spring when with luck my new book would be published. also, i met my english publisher recently and had a wonderful time with him. he is a fine old man who says he reads all submitted manuscripts sitting on a haystack; he tried to talk me into giving him a fine old witchcraft book and made me what he said was an english martini, which was all vermouth and perfectly terrible. he says my book is due out in england this month. he wants the new book without even seeing it, which is very flattering.

  stanley is working fiercely at a new yorker profile, which looks terrific. he has been at it for three months, and the end is finally in sight. he has another one to do after this one, and he has not been going into town very much. partly because i am very reluctant to be alone, and partly because it’s been too hot. also the baseball season goes on nicely, and we spend literally two hours a day in front of the television set watching brooklyn win. or lose, which they did today. when we have company everyone gathers in the study while the sun shines beautifully outside, and everyone yells and jumps up and down, and hollers at the umpire. after the ballgame everyone goes outside and sits in the sun. the children, who are much smarter, play baseball instead of watching, and after a rough afternoon at the television set we can if we like go out and play a few innings on the front lawn. i turn out to be a fairly good hitter so far, but unable to catch the ball. laurie is a nice switch hitter so far, but can’t pitch. stanley can both hit and pitch, but worries so about the relative positions of the bases that he has no time for anything else.

  stanley figured out that if he put a pitcher of cocktails on the yellow table, and baby got in the playpen and laurie and jan in the tree house, and our guests stood over the charcoal cooker and watched the hamburgers, i would have nothing to do and could lie in the sun, and, for a wonder, it works out almost that way. we found that if you give guests enough to drink they don’t mind cooking their own dinners. so we eat hamburgers and salad and then all play croquet and the children have a heavenly time toasting marshmallows. as a result of all this, we are inviting people lavishly for every weekend; they think they are being royally entertained, and we profit because they always bring gifts for the children, play baseball and croquet, and finally cook dinner for us. june, who is now fiction editor of charm magazine and buying all my stories she can get past the senior editor, comes up often.

  laurie did get promoted, after all, and next year jannie will join him on the school bus. stanley took them to new york last week, to the dentist and to see charlie chaplin in city lights, and now they have a chaplin imitation, which they do with stanley’s cane. laurie thought the chaplin movie was the funniest thing he had ever seen. joanne was dubious, since there was too much she couldn’t understand. sally, who stays home in her playpen, has gotten to be a wonderful, happy ba
by. she plays with jan and laurie, and runs around the house wildly. toby is scared to death of her, because she sits on him without warning. the cats stay well out of her reach.

  my dishes are still undone, stanley’s pants still unmended, and now he wants me to read the first thirty pages of his profile. if i expect to get any sleep tonight i must finish this and get to work. write me soon, and lots of love,

  s.

  • • •

  “I thought I’d rest awhile, dear. I did three paragraphs all at once and it tired me out.”

  [To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]

  friday [July 1950]

  dear mama and papa,

  you will understand clearly from the fact that i am writing that i ought to be in the kitchen making a cake for the weekend and that there are several million words of novel due next week and that i ought really to be feeding the baby and writing a story and washing the breakfast dishes, if not in town doing the shopping. as a matter of fact, it’s not true at all: baby is still asleep, i ordered by phone, i am not at all sure we should have a cake this weekend after all, and i am nicely ahead on literature. i do have a mystery story i could be reading, but that’s all. my children are off bothering the neighbors and stanley is off somewhere in pennsylvania, and i haven’t done any dishes since he left.

  my only trouble is lack of energy. i spent all morning out in the sun, watching the children play in their new wading pool and wanting to get in myself. it is nine feet across and holds four hundred gallons of water, and is just deep enough for joanne to get her stomach up off the bottom and swim. i myself do quite nicely, since i wait till the children are through and then can spend a quiet few minutes lying up to my neck in water; the only problem is that someone always turns the hose on you. we also got the children a playhouse, where they now eat all their meals. it has chairs and table and will hold four children comfortably, sitting down to eat. emboldened by this, i have invited two fresh air children, a boy laurie’s age and a girl jannie’s age, to stay for two weeks. they come next wednesday and we are all very excited about it. with the whole place filled up with stuff to entertain children, it seemed so silly to confine it to our own two, and there are no neighborhood children the right age. i think if i had room i’d take a dozen.

  sold two stories last week and got three thousand for my novel. there ought to be enough money there to feed five children for two weeks. even including lollipops. we’ll probably be able to get our spinet now, at least, and the washing machine. perhaps even a cheap old car, one i could learn to drive without risking too much. one of the stories sold to the ladies’ home journal, which has never bought one before, and they want more. also, my agent is now asking copies of my stories to be sent to hollywood. the television broadcast got them interested.

  i got a real fancy doctor—he is what i would call a westport society doctor, and he was highly recommended to me. i went to him finally because i had a new siege with my familiar headache, and i wanted some dope for it—i’ve been taking codeine for five years, and it takes a prescription, of course, so i always have to go to the doctor and let him take a turn at curing the headache before i get my prescription. this guy went at it just like the rest (sinus? teeth? eyes? digestion?) and gave me a thorough examination, including trying to take a bloodtest, only i yelled so he didn’t dare.

  when he got all through, he said with pleasure that there wasn’t a thing wrong with me. he was so pleased that i was a little bit surprised, and then he said happily that he was also an analyst on the side and while of course he did not ordinarily recommend a full analysis for a thing like this, still. so i said certainly not, i wasn’t fool enough for that sort of thing. so he said well, i understood, didn’t i, that my headache was psychological? and i said i understood it perfectly, and so since he couldn’t cure it would he please give me a prescription for codeine? so then i got the westport matron technique. he said by the way, had i ever thought of wanting to lose weight? i said i didn’t care one way or the other. he said well, it was obvious to him that losing weight was psychological just as the headaches were, so that it would be very easy for me to go on a diet, and through some mystic psychic about-face i would then lose my headaches. (i am apparently to relax nervous tension, which takes pounds off you, cures headaches, and probably lifts fallen arches.) i asked him very suspiciously what i had to stop eating and by the time he was through (“i can’t ask you to stop liquor, because in this hot weather everyone wants cold drinks. and there’s no sense giving up bread and potatoes, and depriving yourself of anything you want, because that would make you more nervous. if you get into the right state of mind, you won’t want to eat.”) i went home and checked on this baby’s rates, which come to twenty-five bucks an hour. i am supposed to go back once a week, having eaten all i want, and he will give me an injection which will take it off me. at any rate, i must be the only person in the world paying twenty-five bucks an hour not to be analysed. at the risk of grave nervous tension i have stopped eating anything except salads, and i take the pills he gave me; my headache, by the way, disappeared as soon as i took some of the new codeine.

  there is a wild baseball game going on out front. laurie saved his allowance laboriously and bought himself a dollar softball, which is now the treasure of his life. after the baseball game they will go swimming.

  i am almost too lazy to move. i just went out and watched the baseball game for a minute and nearly fell asleep.

  lots and lots of love to you both. and write me soon.

  s.

  p.s. went to the doctor yesterday and discovered that i had lost seven pounds in a week; he says it will keep up at about that rate. there’s something to this system, after all.

  • • •

  [To Geraldine Jackson]

  thursday [July 1950]

  dear mama,

  thought you might be interested in a brief account of the most hysterical two days which ever happened in our ordinarily calm and level-headed house.

  laurie and jannie and i went to the station yesterday to meet our fresh air kids, discovered with horror that jannie’s girl had missed the train and would not arrive until Saturday, and that, worse, since we waited till all the children were gone, to find our girl, that there was one miserable boy left over, unclaimed and unwanted. so of course we came home to stanley, who was expecting us with a girl five and a boy eight, with two boys nine. the chairman of the thing, who made such a mess of it, has promised that our unwanted boy will leave on saturday morning when the girl comes. our two boys—i specified, by the way, that i would not have any churchgoers—are both devout catholics, and want to go to mass sunday. i said suppose they didn’t and they said then it would be a mortal sin and i told them in effect to get their faces set for a little sinning, because sunday morning i sleep and i do not take kids to mass. they seemed unusually willing to forgo church, and not at all perturbed about missing the lord that morning, although one of them said uncertainly he guessed he better write the sisters about it and maybe they could fix it for him.

  i nearly cried at the station, seeing these kids get off the train, all badly dressed and carrying paper packages of clothes and food, and all the girls wore dresses too big for them, and they all sort of looked around nervously and smiled at everybody. of our boys, larry has no mother and lives in a slum; his family is one of those sleep-three-in-a-bed propositions and when i asked him what he did at home he said play in the streets and go to church. he is the starving one, and eats everything he can find. he is the one who was sent out by mistake, and he is terribly nervous about where he is going next, and is afraid that he will be sent home. naturally, if it comes to that, i will keep him and heaven knows what stanley will say. bobbie is fat and cowardly, but unusually intelligent. he asks questions all the time, wants to do things right, and is always making compliments about everything, as though h
e had been primed to keep telling the people he liked everything or they wouldn’t keep him. he lives in a housing project and flatly refuses to discuss his family, except for his baby sister, who is just sally’s age, but not—he always adds hastily—anywhere near as smart. both boys jump when i tell them to do anything—again i suspect they have been schooled—and discipline is no trouble, except for the fact of course that my own laurie’s nose is out of joint and he is making almost constant trouble, insisting upon special treatment. he likes both boys and is having a fine time, but he is very worried about stanley’s and my favoring them.

  at any rate, they are having a great time, eating like fools, and sleeping and enjoying the fresh air, which is after all, what they are here for. they were in our wading pool all day today, taking time out only for lunch and rest, and quitting only at dinner and television time. both larry and bobbie are fascinated by music, and the height of the day for them is to have me labor simple nursery rhymes on our old organ, so they can sing.

  but, no, when i say confusion, i don’t mean just this. this morning, completely unexpectedly, a girl whom i had interviewed as a maid two weeks ago, and had told to keep in touch with me, arrived, needing a job at once. she had a friend with her who also needed a job at once. i called someone i knew who wanted a girl, we checked references, and tonight we both have maids. mine is named elmira, a nice girl from the south, who reminds me of alta in her manner—sort of deliberate and thoughtful. she is no cook, heaven knows, but during the time today when both girls were waiting here they cleaned the whole upstairs, and elmira seems very competent in that department. she is nice to the children, and they seem to like her. she was not at all disturbed at finding two more children here, and treated them very nicely. i had taken the new york boys aside and said that any remarks about her being colored and i would whale them both—a familiar punishment, i discover—and they were both excessively polite to her. anyway when i say confusion i mean five children in all going different directions, my agent calling up frantically every hour about a fight with the publishers about my new contract, them wanting half of second serial rights, and two maids, one being broken in, the other keeping me on the phone calling people to find her a spot. and stanley worrying about his shoes which were being soled and were not ready. and the ball game on the radio. and the dog trying to hide under the couch because there was thunder.