No one breathed while her daughter opened the package, with all due care for folding the wrappings, winding pieces of string, drawing out the operation. Finally, incredibly, a box appeared.
“Candy,” said her daughter. “Granny, how nice of you!” She showed the box around appreciatively.
“Open it, open it,” shouted the grandchildren.
“After Granny is through, we will all have a piece.”
Next, the son-in-law opened his present. “A tie,” he said with great enthusiasm. “Look, everyone, a beautiful blue and red and orange and green tie!”
The younger grandchild, the little girl who was supposed to look like Granny as a child, received a set of dishes and set immediately to serving everyone a second portion of chocolate pudding upon them. The older grandchild received a cowboy gun.
“Gee, Granny,” he said. “Gee.”
“You see,” Granny explained, regarding her family lovingly, “I went and lost my list.”
“Too bad,” said her daughter, opening the candy box.
“A shame,” said her son-in-law, regarding his tie dubiously.
“And,” Granny went on, “I had to try to remember what you all wanted.”
“This is what I wanted,” said her older grandchild immediately. “Hands up,” he added to his father.
“And” Granny said to her daughter and son-in-law, “I met the most surprising young man. Right about lunchtime, when I was just going into a restaurant for a cup of tea, he rushed right past me, and nearly knocked me down. It was very rude of him, but he was in a great hurry.” Granny stopped and laughed at the expressions on the faces of her daughter and her son-in-law. “He stopped and apologized to me,” she went on, “and would you believe it? He said he was going to be married. He said,” she continued, sighing romantically, “that after three years of courting his lady had finally consented.”
“Amazing,” said her son-in-law.
“Charming,” said his wife.
“It was positively sentimental,” said Granny happily.
THE VERY STRANGE HOUSE NEXT DOOR
published originally as
“Strangers in Town,” in
The Saturday Evening Post, May 1959
I DON’T GOSSIP. IF there is anything in this world I loathe, it is gossip. A week or so ago in the store, Dora Powers started to tell me that nasty rumor about the Harris boy again, and I came right out and said to her if she repeated one more word of that story to me I wouldn’t speak to her for the rest of my life, and I haven’t. It’s been a week, and not one word have I said to Dora Powers, and that’s what I think of gossip. Tom Harris has always been too easy on that boy anyway; the young fellow needs a good whipping, and he’d stop all this ranting around, and I’ve said so to Tom Harris a hundred times or more.
If I didn’t get so mad when I think about that house next door, I’d almost have to laugh, seeing people in town standing in the store and on corners and dropping their voices to talk about fairies and leprechauns, when every living one of them knows there isn’t any such thing and never has been, and them just racking their brains to find new tales to tell. I don’t hold with gossip, as I say, even if it’s about leprechauns and fairies, and it’s my held opinion that Jane Dollar is getting feeble in the mind. The Dollars weren’t ever noted for keeping their senses right up to the end, anyway, and Jane’s no older than her mother was when she sent a cake to the bake sale and forgot to put the eggs in it. Some said she did it on purpose to get even with the ladies for not asking her to take a booth, but most just said the old lady had lost track of things, and I dare say she could have looked out and seen fairies in her garden if it ever came into her mind. When the Dollars get that age, they’ll tell anything, and that’s right where Jane Dollar is now, give or take six months.
My name is Addie Spinner, and I live down on Main Street, the last house but one. There’s just one house after mine, and then Main Street kind of runs off into the woods—Spinner’s Thicket, they call the woods, on account of my grandfather building the first house in the village. Before the crazy people moved in, the house past mine belonged to the Bartons, but they moved away because he got a job in the city, and high time, too, after them living off her sister and her husband for upward of a year.
Well, after the Bartons finally moved out—owing everyone in town, if you want my guess—it wasn’t long before the crazy people moved in, and I knew they were crazy right off when I saw that furniture. I already knew they were young folks, and probably not married long, because I saw them when they came to look at the house. Then when I saw the furniture go in I knew there was going to be trouble between me and her.
The moving van got to the house about eight in the morning. Of course, I always have my dishes done and my house swept up long before that, so I took my mending for the poor out on the side porch and really got caught up on a lot I’d been letting slide. It was a hot day, so I just fixed myself a salad for my lunch, and the side porch is a nice cool place to sit and eat on a hot day, so I never missed a thing going into that house.
First, there were the chairs, all modern, with no proper legs and seats, and I always say that a woman who buys herself that flyaway kind of furniture has no proper feeling for her house—for one thing, it’s too easy to clean around those little thin legs; you can’t get a floor well-swept without a lot of hard work. Then, she had a lot of low tables, and you can’t fool me with them—when you see those little low tables, you can always tell there’s going to be a lot of drinking liquor going on in that house; those little tables are made for people who give cocktail parties and need a lot of places to put glasses down. Hattie Martin, she has one of those low tables, and the way Martin drinks is a crime. Then, when I saw the barrels going in next door, I was sure. No one just married has that many dishes without a lot of cocktail glasses, and you can’t tell me any different.
When I went down to the store later, after they were all moved in, I met Jane Dollar, and I told her about the drinking that was going to go on next door, and she said she wasn’t a bit surprised, because the people had a maid. Not someone to come one day a week and do the heavy cleaning—a maid. Lived in the house and everything. I said I hadn’t noticed any maid, and Jane said most things if I hadn’t noticed them she wouldn’t believe they existed in this world, but the Wests’ maid was sure enough; she’d been in the store not ten minutes earlier buying a chicken. We didn’t think she’d rightly have time enough to cook a chicken before suppertime, but then we decided that probably the chicken was for tomorrow, and tonight the Wests were planning on going over to the inn for dinner and the maid could fix herself an egg or something. Jane did say that one trouble with having a maid—Jane never had a maid in her life, and I wouldn’t speak to her if she did—was that you never had anything left over. No matter what you planned, you had to get new meat every day.
I looked around for the maid on my way home. The quickest way to get to my house from the store is to take the path that cuts across the back garden of the house next door, and even though I don’t use it generally—you don’t meet neighbors to pass the time of day with, going along a back path—I thought I’d better be hurrying a little to fix my own supper, so I cut across the Wests’ back garden. West, that was their name, and what the maid was called I don’t know, because Jane hadn’t been able to find out. It was a good thing I did take the path, because there was the maid, right out there in the garden, down on her hands and knees, digging.
“Good evening,” I said just as polite as I could. “It’s kind of damp to be down on the ground.”
“I don’t mind,” she said. “I like things that grow.”
I must say she was a pleasant-speaking woman, although too old, I’d think, for domestic work. The poor thing must have been in sad straits to hire out, and yet here she was just as jolly and round as an apple. I thought maybe she was an old aunt or something, and they took this way of keeping her, so I said, still very polite, “I see you just moved i
n today?”
“Yes,” she said, not really telling me much.
“The family’s name is West?”
“Yes.”
“You might be Mrs. West’s mother?”
“No.”
“An aunt, possibly?”
“No.”
“Not related at all?”
“No.”
“You’re just the maid?” I thought afterward that she might not like it mentioned, but once it was out I couldn’t take it back.
“Yes.” She answered pleasant enough, I will say that for her.
“The work is hard, I expect?”
“No.”
“Just the two of them to care for?”
“Yes.”
“I’d say you wouldn’t like it much.”
“It’s not bad,” she said. “I use magic a lot, of course.”
“Magic?” I said. “Does that get your work done sooner?”
“Indeed it does,” she said with not so much as a smile or a wink. “You wouldn’t think, would you, that right now I’m down on my hands and knees making dinner for my family?”
“No,” I said. “I wouldn’t think that.”
“See?” she said. “Here’s our dinner.” And she showed me an acorn, I swear she did, with a mushroom and a scrap of grass in it.
“It hardly looks like enough to go around,” I said, kind of backing away.
She laughed at me, kneeling there on the ground with her acorn, and said, “If there’s any left over, I’ll bring you a dish; you’ll find it wonderfully filling.”
“But what about your chicken?” I said; I was well along the path away from her, and I did want to know why she got the chicken if she didn’t think they were going to eat it.
“Oh, that,” she said. “That’s for my cat.”
Well, who buys a whole chicken for a cat, that shouldn’t have chicken bones anyway? Like I told Jane over the phone as soon as I got home, Mr. Honeywell down at the store ought to refuse to sell it to her, or at least make her take something more fitting, like ground meat, even though neither of us believed for a minute that the cat was really going to get the chicken, or that she even had a cat, come to think of it; crazy people will say anything that comes into their heads.
I know for a fact that no one next door ate chicken that night, though; my kitchen window overlooks their dining room if I stand on a chair, and what they ate for dinner was something steaming in a big brown bowl. I had to laugh, thinking about that acorn, because that was just what the bowl looked like—a big acorn. Probably that was what put the notion in her head. And, sure enough, later she brought over a dish of it and left it on my back steps, me not wanting to open the door late at night with a crazy lady outside, and like I told Jane, I certainly wasn’t going to eat any outlandish concoction made by a crazy lady. But I kind of stirred it around with the end of a spoon, and it smelled all right. It had mushrooms in it and beans, but I couldn’t tell what else, and Jane and I decided that probably we were right the first time and the chicken was for tomorrow.
I had to promise Jane I’d try to get a look inside to see how they set out that fancy furniture, so next morning I brought back their bowl and marched right up to the front door—mostly around town we go in and out back doors but being as they were new and especially since I wasn’t sure how you went about calling when people had a maid, I used the front—and gave a knock. I had gotten up early to make a batch of doughnuts, so I’d have something to put in the bowl when I took it back, so I knew that the people next door were up and about because I saw him leaving for work at seven-thirty. He must have worked in the city, to have to get off so early. Jane thinks he’s in an office, because she saw him going toward the depot, and he wasn’t running; people who work in offices don’t have to get in on the dot, Jane said, although how she would know I couldn’t tell you.
It was little Mrs. West who opened the door, and I must say she looked agreeable enough. I thought with the maid to bring her breakfast and all, she might still be lying in bed, the way they do, but she was all dressed in a pink housedress and was wide awake. She didn’t ask me in right away, so I kind of moved a little toward the door, and then she stepped back and said wouldn’t I come in, and I must say, funny as that furniture is, she had it fixed up nice, with green curtains on the windows. I couldn’t tell from my house what the pattern was on those curtains, but once I was inside I could see it was a pattern of green leaves kind of woven in, and the rug, which of course I had seen when they brought it in, was green, too. Some of those big boxes that went in must have held books, because there were a lot of books all put away in bookcases, and before I had a chance to think I said, “My, you must have worked all night to get everything arranged so quick. I didn’t see your lights on, though.”
“Mallie did it,” she said.
“Mallie being the maid?”
She kind of smiled, and then she said, “She’s more like a godmother than a maid, really.”
I do hate to seem curious, so I just said, “Mallie must keep herself pretty busy. Yesterday she was out digging your garden.”
“Yes.” It was hard to glean anything out of these people, with their short answers.
“I brought you some doughnuts,” I said.
“Thank you.” She put the bowl down on one of those little tables—Jane thinks they must hide the wine, because there wasn’t a sight of any such thing that I could see—and then she said, “We’ll offer them to the cat.”
Well, I can tell you I didn’t much care for that. “You must have quite a hungry cat,” I said to her.
“Yes,” she said. “I don’t know what we’d do without him. He’s Mallie’s cat, of course.”
“I haven’t seen him,” I said. If we were going to talk about cats, I figured I could hold my own, having had one cat or another for a matter of sixty years, although it hardly seemed a sensible subject for two ladies to chat over. Like I told Jane, there was a lot she ought to be wanting to know about the village and the people in it and who to go to for hardware and whatnot—I know for a fact I’ve put a dozen people off Tom Harris’ hardware store since he charged me seventeen cents for a pound of nails—and I was just the person to set her straight on the town. But she was going on about the cat. “—fond of children,” she was saying.
“I expect he’s company for Mallie,” I said.
“Well, he helps her, you know,” she said, and then I began to think maybe she was crazy, too.
“And how does the cat help Mallie?”
“With her magic.”
“I see,” I said, and I started to say goodbye fast, figuring to get home to the telephone, because people around the village certainly ought to be hearing about what was going on. But before I could get to the door, the maid came out of the kitchen and said good morning to me, real polite, and then the maid said to Mrs. West that she was putting together the curtains for the front bedroom, and would Mrs. West like to decide on the pattern? And while I just stood there with my jaw hanging, she held out a handful of cobwebs—and I never did see anyone before or since who was able to hold a cobweb pulled out neat, or anyone who would want to, for that matter—and she had a blue jay’s feather and a curl of blue ribbon, and she asked me how I liked her curtains.
Well, that did for me, and I got out of there and ran all the way to Jane’s house, and, of course, she never believed me. She walked me home just so she could get a look at the outside of the house, and I will be everlastingly shaken if they hadn’t gone and put up curtains in that front bedroom, soft white net with a design of blue that Jane said looked like a blue jay’s feather. Jane said they were the prettiest curtains she ever saw, but they gave me the shivers every time I looked at them.
It wasn’t two days after that I began finding things. Little things, and even some inside my own house. Once there was a basket of grapes on my back steps, and I swear those grapes were never grown around our village. For one thing, they shone like they were covered with silver d
ust, and smelled like some foreign perfume. I threw them in the garbage, but I kept a little embroidered handkerchief I found on the table in my front hall, and I’ve got it still in my dresser drawer.
Once I found a colored thimble on the fence post, and once my cat, Samantha, that I’ve had for eleven years and more, came in wearing a little green collar and spat at me when I took it off. One day I found a leaf basket on my kitchen table filled with hazelnuts, and it made me downright shaking mad to think of someone’s coming in and out of my house without so much as asking, and me never seeing them come or go.
Things like that never happened before the crazy people moved into the house next door, and I was telling Mrs. Acton so, down on the corner one morning, when young Mrs. O’Neil came by and told us that when she was in the store with her baby she met Mallie the maid. The baby was crying because he was having a time with his teething, and Mallie gave him a little green candy to bite on. We thought Mrs. O’Neil was crazy herself to let her baby have candy that came from that family, and said so, and I told them about the drinking that went on, and the furniture getting arranged in the dark, and the digging in the garden, and Mrs. Acton said she certainly hoped they weren’t going to think that just because they had a garden they had any claim to be in the Garden Club.
Mrs. Acton is president of the Garden Club. Jane says I ought to be president, if things were done right, on account of having the oldest garden in town, but Mrs. Acton’s husband is the doctor, and I don’t know what people thought he might do to them when they were sick if Mrs. Acton didn’t get to be president. Anyway, you’d think Mrs. Acton had some say about who got into the Garden Club and who didn’t, but I had to admit that in this case we’d all vote with her, even though Mrs. O’Neil did tell us the next day that she didn’t think the people could be all crazy, because the baby’s tooth came through that night with no more trouble.
Just an Ordinary Day: Stories Page 43