Before she had taken off her hat, Nancy pressed the dime into her hand. “Please,” Nancy said. “Wish right away.” She held her breath, and so did Jill. “It’s the second wish,” Nancy said.
“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Waite frowned. “Really,” she said, “I wish you girls would save your games for some time when I’m not so busy, and so tired.” She tried to make her voice gentle, but it was sharp in spite of her. “I’ve been shopping all day,” she said. “I’m really very tired, girls, and I’ve got a lot to do. Can’t it wait?”
When she saw Nancy’s and Jill’s disappointment, she sighed impatiently and said in a resigned voice, “All right, then. What do you want me to wish for?”
“Anything,” Nancy said eagerly. “That’s what it does—it gives you anything you wish for.”
“I could wish dinner was all made,” Mrs. Waite said.
“Dinner couldn’t be all made,” Jill said reasonably. “The dime wouldn’t know what to cook, for one thing. And anyway, it’s too early.”
“I suppose,” Mrs. Waite said. She stood frowning while her hands absently busied themselves with the packages on the table. “I know,” she said. “How do I do it?”
“Take the dime in your hand,” Nancy told her carefully. “Count to ten, and then make your wish.”
“All right,” Mrs. Waite said. She held out her hand, and Nancy put the dime into it. Slowly Mrs. Waite counted to ten, and then she said, “I wish the dishes I left in the sink when I went out this afternoon were all washed and put away.”
“Do you think that’s all right, for a real wish?” Nancy asked Jill anxiously.
“It’s too late, anyway,” Jill pointed out. “She’s already wished it.”
“It’s the best I can do,” Mrs. Waite said. She turned back to her packages. “I hope your magic dime works, because I’d like nothing better than to be saved doing those dishes.” She had taken off her hat and coat, and now, selecting the packages that went to the kitchen, she went down the hall and opened the kitchen’s swinging door, while Nancy and Jill, who felt a certain justifiable anxiety about the powers of their wishing dime, followed her.
A burst of laughter met them when Mrs. Waite pushed open the door. Sally and George, each wearing an apron, were racing around the kitchen table, George flicking at Sally’s feet with the dish towel. The dishes were washed, and most of them were dried and stacked on the table.
“Be fresh to me, will you,” George was shouting.
The kitchen table, with its load of dishes, trembled perilously as George and Sally frolicked around it. Sally saw her mother and, with a wild scream, fled behind Mrs. Waite for protection. George, unable to stop in time, crashed against Mrs. Waite and sent her, with Sally, Nancy, and Jill behind her, sprawling into the hall, while the door swung after them and then gently back into George’s face.
For a minute Mrs. Waite sat where she had fallen. “A magic dime,” she said to herself. “Me still in my best shoes.” She looked up at Nancy and Jill, who, with Sally, were hovering over her solicitously. “I see your dime got my dishes washed,” Mrs. Waite said ironically.
“I told you,” Nancy said. “It’s a real wishing dime.”
“Mrs. Waite,” George said weakly, peering red-faced around the edge of the swinging door, “Mrs. Waite, I’m terribly sorry—”
“Never mind, George,” Mrs. Waite said, accepting Sally’s hand to help herself up. “I wished for it.”
“He was chasing me, Mother,” Sally said helpfully.
“Don’t those two act funny, though?” Nancy said to Jill.
“Chasing each other,” Jill said disgustedly.
“Mrs. Waite,” George said, “I can’t tell you how sorry—”
“We were doing the dishes for you,” Sally said eagerly. She and George had been carefully not looking at each other, but now Sally looked at him accidentally, and they both began to giggle.
“We thought we’d wash the dishes for you,” George explained, and then he and Sally began to laugh again. “We were sort of washing the dishes,” he went on feebly, “and I got to chasing—we got to fooling around—I guess I ran into you.”
Mrs. Waite looked at Nancy solemnly clutching the dime in her hand, at Jill standing close to her, at Sally and George with their red faces; and she began to laugh helplessly.
“She wished the dishes would get washed,” Nancy said to Sally.
“My wish came true,” Sally said, surprised. “I hadn’t thought of it till now.”
“We figured it came true,” Jill said. “Didn’t we, Nancy?”
Nancy nodded. “There’s one left,” she said. She pulled Jill to one side and whispered in her ear.
Jill, nodding, said, “That’s right. I think so, too.”
Sally and Mrs. Waite began to put the dishes away, and George backed carefully into a corner, apologizing violently whenever he got in Mrs. Waite’s way.
Finally Nancy went over to her mother and said, “This is very, very important, everybody. We’re going to make our last wish.”
Mrs. Waite paused, both hands full of silverware, to look with suspicion on her younger daughter. Sally and George watched, full of curiosity, as Nancy and Jill, with great ceremony, put their hands together with the dime between.
“This is the last wish on this dime,” Nancy said, turning to explain to her mother more fully. “Because this is our very own wishing dime, Jill and I are going to make the last wish. You all had a chance to wish on it, and now it’s our turn.”
“And we’re going to wish now,” Jill said.
“One, two, three, four, five,” Nancy said with great dramatic emphasis.
“Six, seven, eight, nine, ten,” Jill said.
“With this magic dime, we wish for two Popsicles.”
Later, when they were working on their Popsicles—Jill had orange, and Nancy’s was cherry—Nancy said, “The nicest thing about wishing dimes is that they’re about something special.”
“Suppose we had one every day,” Jill suggested. “They wouldn’t be half so much fun.”
“There aren’t that many things to wish for,” Nancy said wisely.
“The nicest thing about wishing dimes,” Jill said, “is that after you’re all through wishing with them, you can use them to spend.”
And what about Mr. Howard J. Kenney, who had given the dime away for luck? Mr. Kenney arrived home about fifteen minutes after he had given away the dime, and he was met at the doorway by a hysterical wife and a group of chattering neighbors. Mr. Kenney’s wife, with great presence of mind, had remembered the correct name of a song she had heard when the man from the radio station called her; she was expecting immediate delivery on a new car, a new refrigerator, an astronomical sum of money, a new fur coat, and a complete wardrobe of new clothes.
ABOUT TWO NICE PEOPLE
Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1951
APROBLEM OF SOME importance, certainly, these days, is that of anger. When one half of the world is angry at the other half, or one half of a nation is angry at the rest, or one side of town feuds with the other side, it is hardly surprising, when you stop to think about it, that so many people lose their tempers with so many other people. Even if, as in this case, they are two people not usually angry, two people whose lives are obscure and whose emotions are gentle, whose smiles are amiable and whose voices are more apt to be cheerful than raised in fury. Two people, in other words, who would much rather be friends than not and who yet, for some reason, perhaps chemical or sociological or environmental, enter upon a mutual feeling of dislike so intense that only a very drastic means can bring them out of it.
Take two such people:
Ellen Webster was what was referred to among her friends as a “sweet” girl. She had pretty, soft hair and dark, soft eyes, and she dressed in soft colors and wore frequently a lovely old-fashioned brooch that had belonged to her grandmother. Ellen thought of herself as a very happy and very lucky person because she had a good job, and was able to buy herse
lf a fair number of soft-colored dresses and skirts and sweaters and coats and hats; she had, by working hard at it evenings, transformed her one-room apartment from a bare, neat place into a charming little refuge with her sewing basket on the table and a canary at the window; she had a reasonable conviction that someday, perhaps soon, she would fall in love with a nice young man and they would be married and Ellen would devote herself wholeheartedly to children and baking cakes and mending socks. This not-very-unusual situation, with its perfectly ordinary state of mind, was a source of great happiness to Ellen. She was, in a word, not one of those who rail against their fate, who live in sullen hatred of the world. She was—her friends were right—a sweet girl.
On the other hand, even if you would not have called Walter Nesmith sweet, you would very readily have thought of him as a “nice” fellow, or an “agreeable” person, or even—if you happened to be a little old white-haired lady—a “dear boy.” There was a subtle resemblance between Ellen Webster and Walter Nesmith. Both of them were the first resort of their friends in trouble, for instance. Walter’s ambitions, which included the rest of his life, were refreshingly similar to Ellen’s: Walter thought that someday he might meet some sweet girl, and would then devote himself wholeheartedly to coming home of an evening to read his paper, and perhaps work in the garden on Sundays.
Walter thought that he would like to have two children, a boy and a girl. Ellen thought that she would like to have three children, a boy and two girls. Walter was very fond of cherry pie, Ellen preferred Boston cream. Ellen enjoyed romantic movies. Walter preferred westerns. They read almost exactly the same books.
In the ordinary course of events, the friction between Ellen and Walter would have been very slight. But—and what could cause a thing like this?—the ordinary course of events was shattered by a trifle like a telephone call.
Ellen’s telephone number was 3-4126. Walter’s telephone number was 3-4216. Ellen lived in apartment 3-A and Walter lived in apartment 3-B; these apartments were across the hall from each other, and very often Ellen, opening her door at precisely quarter of nine in the morning and going toward the elevator, met Walter, who opened his door at precisely quarter of nine in the morning and went toward the elevator. On these occasions Ellen customarily said, “Good morning,” and looked steadfastly the other way. Walter usually answered, “Good morning,” and avoided looking in her direction. Ellen thought that a girl who allowed herself to be informal with strangers created a bad impression, and Walter thought that a man who took advantage of living in the same building to strike up an acquaintance with a girl was a man of little principle. One particularly fine morning he said to Ellen in the elevator, “Lovely day,” and she replied, “Yes, isn’t it?” and both of them felt secretly that they had been bold. How this mutual respect for each other’s dignity could have degenerated into fury is a mystery not easily understood.
It happened that one evening—and, to do her strict justice, Ellen had had a hard day: she was coming down with a cold, it had rained steadily for a week, her stockings were unwashed, and she had broken a fingernail—the phone which had the number 3-4126 rang. Ellen had been opening a can of chicken soup in the kitchenette, and she had her hands full; she said, “Darn,” and managed to drop and break a cup in her hurry to answer the phone.
“Hello?” she said, thinking, This is going to be something cheerful.
“Hello, is Walter there?”
“Walter?”
“Walter Nesmith. I want to speak to Walter, please.”
“This is the wrong number,” Ellen said, thinking with the self-pity that comes with the first stages of a head cold, that no one ever called her.
“Is this three-four two one six?”
“This is three-four one two six,” Ellen said, and hung up.
At that time, although she knew that the person in the apartment across the hall was named Walter Nesmith, she could not have told the color of his hair or even of the outside of his apartment door. She went back to her soup and had a match in her hand to light the stove, when the phone rang again.
“Hello?” Ellen said without enthusiasm; this could be someone cheerful, she was thinking.
“Hello, is Walter there?”
“This is the wrong number again,” Ellen said; if she had not been such a very sweet girl she might have let more irritation show in her voice.
“I want to speak to Walter Nesmith, please.”
“This is three-four one two six again,” Ellen said patiently. “You want three-four two one six.”
“What?” said the voice.
“This,” said Ellen, “is number three-four one two six. The number you want is three-four two one six.” Like anyone who has tried to say a series of numbers several times, she found her anger growing. Surely anyone of normal intelligence, she was thinking, surely anyone ought to be able to dial a phone, anyone who can’t dial a phone shouldn’t be allowed to have a nickel.
She had got all the way back into the kitchenette and was reaching out for the can of soup before the phone rang again. This time when she answered she said, “Hello?” rather sharply for Ellen, and with no illusions about who it was going to be.
“Hello, may I please speak to Walter?”
At that point it started. Ellen had a headache and it was raining and she was tired and she was apparently not going to get any chicken soup until this annoyance was stopped.
“Just a minute,” she said into the phone.
She put the phone down with an understandable bang on the table, and marched, without taking time to think, out of her apartment and up to the door across the hall. “Walter Nesmith” said a small card at the doorbell. Ellen rang the doorbell with what was, for her, a vicious poke. When the door opened she said immediately, without looking at him:
“Are you Walter Nesmith?”
Now, Walter had had a hard day, too, and he was coming down with a cold, and he had been trying ineffectually to make himself a cup of hot tea in which he intended to put a spoonful of honey to ease his throat, that being a remedy his aunt had always recommended for the first onslaught of a cold. If there had been one fraction less irritation in Ellen’s voice, or if Walter had not taken off his shoes when he came home that night, it might very probably have turned out to be a pleasant introduction, with Walter and Ellen dining together on chicken soup and hot tea, and perhaps even sharing a bottle of cough medicine. But when Walter opened the door and heard Ellen’s voice, he was unable to answer her cordially, and so he said briefly:
“I am. Why?”
“Will you please come and answer my phone?” said Ellen, too annoyed to realize that this request might perhaps bewilder Walter.
“Answer your phone?” said Walter stupidly.
“Answer my phone,” said Ellen firmly. She turned and went back across the hall, and Walter stood in his doorway in his stocking feet and watched her numbly. “Come on” she said sharply as she went into her own apartment, and Walter, wondering briefly if they allowed harmless lunatics to live alone as though they were just like other people, hesitated for an instant and then followed her, on the theory that it would be wise to do what she said when she seemed so cross, and reassuring himself that he could leave the door open and yell for help if necessary. Ellen stamped into her apartment and pointed at the phone where it lay on the table. “There. Answer it.”
Eyeing her sideways, Walter edged over to the phone and picked it up. “Hello,” he said nervously. Then, “Hello? Hello?” Looking at her over the top of the phone, he said, “What do you want me to do now?”
“Do you mean to say,” said Ellen ominously, “that that terrible terrible person has hung up?”
“I guess so,” said Walter, and fled back to his own apartment.
The door had only just closed behind him, when the phone rang again, and Ellen, answering it, heard, “May I speak to Walter, please?”
Not a very serious mischance, surely. But the next morning Walter pointedly avoided goin
g down in the elevator with Ellen, and sometime during that day the deliveryman left a package addressed to Ellen at Walter’s door.
When Walter found the package he took it manfully under his arm and went boldly across the hall and rang Ellen’s doorbell. When Ellen opened her door she thought at first—and she may have been justified—that Walter had come to apologize for the phone call the evening before, and she even thought that the package under his arm might contain something delightfully unexpected, like a box of candy. They lost another chance then; if Walter had not held out the package and said, “Here,” Ellen would not have gone on thinking that he was trying to apologize in his own shy way, and she would certainly not have smiled warmly, and said, “You shouldn’t have bothered.”
Walter, who regarded transporting a misdelivered parcel across the hall as relatively little bother, said blankly, “No bother at all,” and Ellen, still deceived, said, “But it really wasn’t that important.”
Walter went back into his own apartment convinced that this was a very odd girl indeed, and Ellen, finding that the package had been mailed to her and contained a wool scarf knitted by a cousin, was as much angry as embarrassed because, once having imagined that an apology is forthcoming, it is very annoying not to have one after all, and particularly to have a wool scarf instead of a box of candy.
How this situation disintegrated into the white-hot fury that rose between these two is a puzzle, except for the basic fact that when once a series of misadventures has begun between two people, everything tends to contribute further to a state of misunderstanding. Thus, Ellen opened a letter of Walter’s by mistake, and Walter dropped a bottle of milk—he was still trying to cure his cold, and thought that perhaps milk toast was the thing—directly outside Ellen’s door, so that even after his nervous attempts to clean it up, the floor was still littered with fragments of glass, and puddled with milk.
Just an Ordinary Day: Stories Page 30