Free Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin

the right room.” The transplant from California was obviously a novelty: when the first snow of the season began to fall one afternoon,Shirley’s entire chemistry class insisted on accompanying her to the window to marvel at it. She did not bother telling her classmates that there had been a freak snowfall in Burlingame the previous winter.
    Newness, however, did not translate into popularity. The school was small, with only sixty students in Jackson’s graduating class. And the awkwardness of winning acceptance by long established cliques in senior year was exacerbated by Jackson’s appearance. Her high school yearbook photo reveals a girl with a mass of unruly auburn hair and a stern, slightly puzzled expression. Her clothes were never quite right. “She used to wear a green sweater and a blue skirt, and in those days you didn’t wear a green sweater and a blue skirt,” one of her classmates would say, recalling that Jackson was also “on the heavy side.” She filled her calendar with football games, parties, and plays. The California girl soon grew to love tobogganing and ice skating, and would even try skiing. But she suffered a social setback almost at once, rejected from a sorority she had hoped to join. She did not let her disappointment show, instead cultivating a pose of aloofness. Jackson “didn’t give a darn about being with the in girls or the out girls,” Strobel recalls her mother saying. “That just wasn’t her thing.”
    Geraldine, focused on her own social life, paid little attention to her struggling daughter. Barry Jackson gossiped to his friends that the whole family had given up on her ever dressing or acting the way the restof the Jacksons did. “We just don’t know what will become of Shirley,” he told Marian Morton. Marian’s older brother, Richard Morton, who got to know Shirley at the University of Rochester, also remembered her as an “odd duck.” In a story likely written a few years later, Jackson depicts a high school girl who comes home, sobbing, because she has no date to a basketball game. “i hate that school and i won’t ever go back because they’re so lousy to me. . . . i hate them all and they’re lousy to me and i wish i were pretty!” Her mother rather lamely tries to comfort her, suggesting that her brother take her to the game, but begins and ends the conversation by scolding her for slamming her bedroom door. After her mother leaves the room, she writes on a piece of paper, “i hate my mother . . . i wish that she would die,” and sets it on fire.

    Shirley Jackson in Rochester, mid-1930s.
    By the Christmas holidays, Jackson had accumulated a small gaggle of girlfriends. Judging from the way she portrayed them later, they occupied a rung on the social ladder close to hers. In one of her unpublished stories, a high school girl tells the other unpopular girls at recess, “My father doesn’t like me to go out with boys. You know, the things they do.” In an early draft of Hangsaman that offers a glimpse of Natalie in high school, her only friends are Doris (“fat, and badly dressed, and stupid, and the center of a little group of girls who did things by themselves, went to movies and had parties and went swimming in the summer, in a gay chattering body whose animation never quite concealed the fact that they were ugly”) and Doris’s sidekick Ginny (“she played sentimental tunes very badly on the piano, and was given to much giggling flirtation with her teachers”). Sitting in the drugstore with them, Natalie “knew that she was marked, just as irretrievably as though they had all worn distinctive uniforms, as one of the little group [of] social outsiders.” The humiliation of attending a school dance with these girls instead of with a date is redeemed only by her encounter there with a teacher, who compliments the poems she submitted anonymously to the school newspaper. “i knew they were yours, of course,” he tells her. “even though you