Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings

by Shirley Jackson

  • Any remark such as “But gosh, that was way back years ago when you were young” is regarded as dirty tactics.

  • The father determines who shall have the floor by shouting “Quiet!” and half rising from his chair.

  • Outside evidence (what Ernie saw, what Kathy said, the probable opinion of old Mrs. Atkins next door) is not allowed as legitimate matter of record, but there is no rule against bringing it up anyway.

  • Only the father is permitted to say, “Do as I say, not as I do.”

  • Any apology fairly earned must be delivered as grudgingly as possible (“Yeah, so I said I’m sorry”), the mother and father excepted; their apologies must be graceful and complete, to teach the children manners.

  • In impersonal arguments, reference books are referred to (“So go and look it up if you don’t believe me”) but never referred to.

  • Any pronouncement by the mother or the father beginning “From this moment on, every single one of you children will…” can be ignored.

  • Everyone must choose a side at once, as soon as the issue is brought forward, although it is not necessary to stay on the side you choose if things seem to be going the other way.

  In addition to these formal ground rules, certain house rules apply in every family, differing, of course, according to the number of combatants, their several ages, and the varying vulnerabilities of the parents. In our family the basic house rules are:

  • The father, who is not a man wholly without prejudice, will not suffer disorder. In his presence, pictures are to be straightened, books lined evenly on the shelves, silverware correctly placed. It is to be understood that no child of any age will tangle with Daddy on this subject. (The day when Jannie, in a fine white rage, deliberately disarranged all the objects on her father’s desk is a day none of us will soon forget.)

  • The mother is to be regarded as entirely unreasonable and beyond the reach of logic on such subjects as adequate clothing, riding bicycles in the street, table manners in general, and writing Christmas thank-you letters. She is not expected to make any sense with regard to underprotection rather than overprotection.

  • The fourteen-year-old son will not permit his privacy to be invaded. Tidy he is not, nor clean, but no one may touch anything that belongs to him.

  • The friends of the eleven-year-old daughter may not be criticized. They are her friends; she herself cannot stand that nasty Linda, she is never never going to walk home with Janet again, Millie’s behavior is just simply horrible; but they are her friends and no one else may cast the second stone.

  • The eight-year-old daughter is not to be crossed. She does things in a particular Sally way, and that way is right. Anyone who disagrees is either insane or, at best, hopelessly ignorant. In all of this she strongly resembles her father.

  • The five-year-old son is adamant on personal dignity. He will listen, reason, and even consent to stop banging that gun against the wall if he is asked nicely, but at your peril lift him, set him aside, or use force against him because he is small.

  • In case the teacher says one thing and the parents another, there is no question in anyone’s mind who is right.

  Once the ground rules are clearly established (house rules are absorbed by trial and error), the family argument should move quickly and effortlessly. Consider, for example, our family skirmish on the question of our television room, a general sore point anyway.

  We have our television set in a small room furnished with a couch, two straight chairs, and three walls of bookcases full of books. In front of the couch is a small round table with two ashtrays on it and, in theory, nothing else. The television setup also includes a radio, a phonograph, and the attachments for the tape recorder. All four children watch television at some time or other during the usual day, and the couch is convenient for a parental nap after dinner. The room is, in fact, what in a less die-hard family might be called a recreation room, or even a music room, or—stretching a point—a library.

  One late afternoon recently, my husband retired to lie down on the couch and watch the last quarter of the football game before dinner. He came storming out at once announcing that no one, no one, no one was ever going to watch television in this house again, or at least only over his dead body. The books had been knocked crooked in all the bookshelves because Barry and Sally had been roughhousing during the commercials. Jannie had left her sewing box and a book borrowed from Linda on one of the chairs. Laurie had been doing his homework in there and the ashtrays were full of torn scraps on which Latin phrases were scrawled, and the floor was covered with little pieces of thread and pencil sharpenings. I myself had left a sweater over the back of the other chair.

  As I was clearly one of the sinning parties, I had no choice but to sneak my sweater out fast and attempt to modify the course of justice, at the same time making it clear to the children that Daddy and I were of one mind on everything. I chose to take the unassailable stand that I had told the children and told the children to pick up their things, and losing television was no more than they deserved for being so messy; but at the same time, unless something was devised to occupy all four of them during the time I was making dinner, it would very likely be impossible for me to get onto the table any of the small refinements—like deep-dish apple pie—of which my husband is very fond.

  My husband said that none of that mattered at all; he would not have the television room left in disorder. Suppose, he demanded fiercely, suppose someone had dropped in to borrow a book? Would we like to have this literate stranger find the books crooked? The ashtrays full of paper? Sweaters lying around everywhere?

  No, Laurie said, that was not fairly argued. In the first place, Dad never lent books to anyone, because it left spaces in the bookshelves. And Jannie had borrowed the book that caused all the disorder from Kate, and he bet that Kate’s bookshelves looked even worse.

  Jannie said they certainly did not; what did Laurie know about Kate’s bookshelves, anyway, always thinking he was so smart?

  I said that the sweater was mine and I had taken it off because I was going to vacuum the Venetian blinds in the television room; would my husband, I asked hotly, want his literate book borrower to find the Venetian blinds dusty?

  Sally said she had not been roughhousing. Barry had pushed her and she had given him a kind of little small kick.

  Barry said she had kicked him hard, right here, and anyway it was Sally who had fallen off the couch onto the bookcase.

  Laurie said if he couldn’t do his homework in the television room, where could he do it? Because how could he work in his room with Jannie playing rock-and-roll on her phonograph all day long?

  My husband said now wait a minute, Jannie had every right in the world to play her own phonograph, and in any case rock-and-roll was a legitimate twelve-bar fast blues form.

  Laurie said that anyone who could call that junk legitimate didn’t know a tenor sax from a clarinet.

  His father said that perhaps Laurie with all his education could not count as high as twelve? Because the twelve-bar blues form was exact and only an idiot could ignore it.

  Laurie said he could play records that would make Jannie’s records sound like a steel mill going full blast.

  Sally and Barry began to fidget over their apple pie, and their father told them absently to run along and watch television, and he said to Laurie, all right, he would take Laurie’s records and Jannie’s records and show Laurie what was meant by a twelve-bar blues, and in Latin too, if Laurie preferred.

  While they were getting out the records, I excused myself from the table and went in and straightened up the television room.

  Some subjects on which we line up even are never going to be settled. Jan, Sally, and I think that I should cut my hair. My husband and Laurie say categorically that I may not, and Barry says that all haircuts are dangerous. My husband, Laurie, and Jannie think that an enormous new cabinet is necessary to hold the coin collection. Barry, Sally, and I would rath
er get a deep freeze, and there would be room in it for the coins, too, as well as the infinity of Popsicles that Sally and Barry believe would be kept there. I hold the most extreme position here; I think that we have too many coins anyway.

  —

  There is one argument in our family that is going to be settled out of hand. Five of us think we should get a new car; there is one holdout who says that we cannot afford it. Four of us think that the new car should be a station wagon; Laurie thinks it should be a convertible, because they are making convertibles now that will hold six, and convertibles are the most, man! Three of us think the new station wagon should have four doors instead of two; Barry believes that if there were doors in the back he would fall out. Two of us think the new four-door station wagon should be pink, but Jannie says that that miserable Cheryl has a pink car and it’s just ugly. One of us thinks that the new pink four-door station wagon is going to have white upholstery and chrome trimmings, and by golly that is just the kind of car we are going to get, as soon as I can talk my husband into it.

  The Pleasures and Perils of Dining Out with Children

  I have four children, and I do not believe that parents who take children to dine in restaurants are necessarily insane. I can think of several adequate reasons for taking our children out for dinner. Perhaps the house has burned down and there are no neighbors charitable enough to take us in. Or our helicopter has crashed on the outskirts of town and the mechanic says, after the manner of mechanics, that no replacement parts can possibly be procured any nearer than Schenectady. Or dragons have invaded our kitchen and eaten everything in the refrigerator. Or I have announced, slamming the breakfast dishes around in the sink, that I am good and sick and tired of cooking meals and washing dishes and tonight I am going to have my dinner in a restaurant—although what I actually have in mind at that moment does not, of course, include the children.

  I am thinking of a gracious dinner in a charming restaurant where the lights and music are soft, where if someone drops a fork the waiter brings another, where the used dishes are never seen again by me. I am beautifully gowned (nothing I have now will do, certainly), and I am going to have a crabmeat cocktail to start. Conversation is sparkling—about books, the better movies, the theater, the ballet. No mention is made of the current occupations of grade three of the local school. There is no lively banter about who was waiting around for Jimmie Brannan at recess. The names of the members of the high school football squad do not come up. All voices are quiet; there are no loud guffaws and no Dear Dollies or Precious Teddy Bears to dine with us. We will linger luxuriously at the table over coffee and brandy. I will come home from my lovely dinner, starry-eyed and in high-heeled shoes, to find the children’s dinner dishes waiting in the sink. The babysitter will cost more than the restaurant. The kitchen floor will need an immediate washing, because of a butter-throwing episode that took place while the babysitter was turning out the kitchen cabinets trying to find the mustard, which I had left in plain sight on the table. The baby will not yet be in bed, the television set will have broken down, and a state of high-tension cold war will be prevailing in the living room. One of the younger children will have accepted a long-distance phone call from Grandma in California, but will be unable to remember anything Grandma said except how come we went out and left the children alone? There will be a note on the telephone pad reading “Mrs. Gbdryl called. Please call her right back.” This mystery will not be solved until two days later, when Marian Williams runs into me in the supermarket and says in an icy kind of way that she is sorry I was too busy to call her but of course it wasn’t the least bit important. It will of course have been extremely important, and if I try to explain that we went out for dinner she will say only that it certainly must be wonderful to be able to get out like that whenever we like. Sometime later in the week I will give up racking my brains and I will call the babysitter and ask her where she put the children’s clothes when she undressed them. It will be a good long time before I make another attempt to live graciously.

  However, sooner or later I am going to run again into one of those barren spells when I cannot think of anything to serve for dinner except meat loaf or tuna fish salad. Sooner or later I am going to announce that I am sick and tired of cooking meals and washing dishes and tonight I am going to have dinner in a restaurant and Daddy can take us all over to The Lake House for dinner.

  The children are delighted. By five-thirty they are starving; washed and dressed in their neatest clothes, they are combed, smiling, alert. Because of this we will arrive at the restaurant somewhat earlier than most of the other diners and will, in fact, find only one waiter who is prepared to serve customers.

  After a brief skirmish over seating arrangements (“Sally, if you would like to go wait in the car while the rest of us have dinner…”), we settle ourselves at a table that turns out to be right on the main highway from the kitchen to the bar, so that my husband and I will have to squeeze closer and closer to the table as the restaurant fills up and traffic gets heavier.

  There is never any question about what the children will order. Barry would like a “peanut butter samwich.” Sally wants “sperghetti.” Jannie wants a well-done hamburger with lots and lots of relish. Laurie, who is fourteen, has no qualms about being in a restaurant; he has been brought here to eat and that is what he is going to do, without any foolishness of talking or playing or the small niceties of table manners. Laurie scowls ferociously at his younger brother and sisters, asks his father why we had to bring the little kids along anyway, and tells the waiter to wait a minute, he has not made up his mind yet. He concentrates sternly on the menu, pausing to ask the waiter whether the filet mignon at four dollars and seventy-five cents is bigger than the sirloin steak for four dollars and fifty cents, trying to cram the maximum amount of food into the limits of one reasonable dinner. He assures himself that he will be brought salad. He asks the waiter to be sure to remember his French-fried potatoes. He checks the desserts in advance, and while he is waiting for his steak to arrive he keeps a sharp eye on other tables to make certain that he will not be taken in by a small portion of lemon pie when the strawberry shortcake is large and lavishly whip-creamed.

  —

  It is a hard compromise between the eating habits of children and the serving habits of restaurants. When the idea of dinner is presented to a small child, he wants to see his dinner at once, all on one plate, with one spoon and one fork to eat it with. He has no patience with the fruit cups and chicken soup that precede his peanut butter sandwich. I have tried ordering Barry’s peanut butter sandwich and Sally’s spaghetti to be served them at once, but this only means that before I am quite through with my crabmeat cocktail, Barry and Sally will be demanding ice cream. At one end of the meal or the other, Sally and Barry are going to be without occupation while the rest of us dine. They will spend this time profitably. They may deal with the table setting, with the result that all the silverware is collected in front of me on the table, to be doled out piece by piece; napkins are trailing festively from the backs of chairs; and the vase of flowers, the salt and pepper shakers, the ashtray, and the sugar bowl all have been removed by their father to a safer table nearby.

  When the attractions of the table setting are lessened (“Sally, if you would like to go and wait in the car while the rest of us have dinner…”), they discover that they can ease themselves from their chairs by sliding gradually under the tablecloth and popping out on the other side of the table between Laurie and Jannie, who are carrying on a conversation very loudly.

  “Yeah?” Laurie is saying. “And who told you you were so smart, I wonder?”

  “You know everything, I guess,” Jannie says. “I guess you know everything, I don’t think.”

  Barry and Sally locate a nice lady over there who looks as though she would be interested in hearing about the dead pigeon the dogs brought home. It is not impossible that there are other small children in the restaurant who would like to play tag in an
d out between the tables. At the very least they can go from one table to another examining what other people eat and asking if it tastes good. When they are brought back to the table by force (“Sally, if you would like…”), they settle down to various drummings, tappings, and kickings, until their father says “QUIET!” in a voice that stills the entire restaurant and, red-faced, he adds in a whisper that the next child who stirs will never see the inside of a restaurant again. He hastens to pay the check before I have quite finished my coffee. The children regard the occasion as a complete success and their behavior as exemplary. They keep referring afterward to “that time when we were so good in the restaurant.”

  —

  Since we do have four children, and since there is an absolute limit to the amount of tuna fish salad my husband can regard with tolerance, and since our helicopter does break down frequently, we have finally, as a family, worked out a few simple solutions to the problem of dining out together. One of these we discovered accidentally: We went to a restaurant where the table mats were printed with a variety of jokes and puzzles. Happily, Laurie and Jannie did crossword puzzles, Sally made follow-the-dot pictures, Barry colored in all the little squares marked with an X, and my husband and I chatted about the new books and the ballet. The only disadvantage was the difficulty in getting the children to eat because they would not permit the waitress to put any plates down on the table mats.

  My husband and I have also tried putting the four children at a table of their own and pretending that they have come in by themselves. This, although it requires almost supernatural acting ability, will delight the children endlessly, since they can peek around at Mommy and Daddy and giggle. Sooner or later, though, Laurie will call across the restaurant, “Hey, Dad, is Jannie allowed to have two desserts?” and the secret is out.

  By far the easiest solution is to visit the restaurant of the children’s choice. This will be a curb-service hamburger stand, the Elite Café on Depot Street, or one of those roadside places that give away free balloons and lollipops and cardboard toys along with cold fried potatoes and unattractive foot-long hot dogs. The children will dine hugely, using large quantities of catsup from the fascinating plastic container, put uncounted numbers of nickels into the jukebox, visit freely a kitchen I would shudder to contemplate, and swing round and round on the stools at the counter. The coffee is usually pretty good at these places, and my husband and I can have a sandwich when we get home.