Free Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories of Shirley Jackson by Shirley Jackson Page B

aware that the repair man had gone into the back of the shop, that she was alone, when she heard a footstep and looked up to see a man in a blue suit coming toward her.
    “Are you Miss X?” the man in the blue suit asked her.
    Miss Morgan opened her mouth, and then said, “Yes,” tiredly.
    “I’ve been looking all over for you,” the man said. “How’d you get away from the sound truck?”
    “I don’t know,” Miss Morgan said. “I ran.”
    “Listen,” the man said, “this town’s no good. No one spotted you.” He opened the door of the booth and waited for Miss Morgan to come.
    “My shoes,” Miss Morgan said, and the man waved his hand impatiently. “You don’t need shoes,” he said. “The car’s right outside.”
    He looked at Miss Morgan with yellow cat eyes and said, “Come on, hurry up.”
    She stood up and he took her arm and said, “We’ll have to do it again tomorrow in Chicago, this town stinks.”
    That night, falling asleep in the big hotel, Miss Morgan thought briefly of Mr. Lang and the undelivered package she had left, along with her hatbox, in the shoe repair shop. Smiling, she pulled the satin quilt up to her chin and fell asleep.

D INNER FOR A G ENTLEMAN

    I T IS NOT POSSIBLE , I frequently think, to walk down the street as fast as you can and kick yourself at the same time. You can stop, of course, and try if you really want to, but, I mean, you’re apt to look a little foolish, and foolish, if you’re me, is what you generally look too much of already.
    I mean, every time I try to show off I get caught; that’s what it boils down to. Every time I get into one of those conversations where I don’t really know what I’m talking about, but I pretend I do, first thing I know there I am saying something I’ve got to back up with proof, and then, I mean, where am I? Well, this day, at any rate, I was walking down the street wishing I could kick myself, with both arms full of bags of groceries and a great dismal cloud of foreboding located somewhere around the back of my neck. So all right, Hugh Talley was a cook. So I mean, I could have left it at that, couldn’t I? I hadn’t needed to say anything, not a word; I hadn’t even needed to listen. But no. So here I was, going down the street, going home to cook dinner for Hugh Talley, just because I wanted to show off, and if I thought I looked foolish now, what was going to happen in about an hour when Hugh Talley sat himself down at the little table in my apartment all grinning and ready for dinner? I mean, I could have kicked myself.
    I’m not stupid; I know it sounds like I am, and I suppose not many people would get caught all the time the way I do. But I’ve noticed that Hugh Talley has that effect on a lot of people—he’s so very handsome, in that man-to-man sort of way that’s horribly effective in the movies, and just pretty awful when you meet it day after day in the office. He makes the other men in the office look pale and sort of shabby. He has a good sunlamp tan and he plays golf and he eats robustly and, more than anything else, Talley loves to put on a silly apron and get out in the kitchen and show the womenfolk how to cook. There is no woman in the world, Talley is fond of saying, who knows how to cook a steak the way a man likes it. Or spaghetti. Or fried chicken. Women—and you should see the look of pained disgust on Talley’s face when he says it—take good meat and cover it with gooey sauces. That , not to put too fine a point on it, is Hugh Talley.
    And me? Well, I don’t play golf, and even though I’ve got a good healthy appetite, my tan tends to build up sort of spottily during the summer and disappear with the first frost. I’m like a thousand other girls in the city—I’ve got a job I like, and I used to share my apartment with another girl, but she got married and so now I live alone, and someday I’ll probably get married to some nice fellow and have two children (a boy first, I think,