Free Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson Page B

finish his New York Times?”
    â€œHours ago,” the doctor said.
    â€œWhat’s he reading now?” I asked.
    â€œThe Tribune,” the doctor said. “Hold your breath.”
    It was so unbelievably bright that I closed my eyes. “Such a lovely time,” I said to the doctor. “Thank you so much for asking me, I can’t tell you how I’ve enjoyed it. Next time you must come to our—”
    â€œIt’s a girl,” the doctor said.
    â€œSarah,” I said politely, as though I were introducing them. I still thought I was perfectly conscious, and then I was. My husband was sitting beside the bed, smiling cheerfully.
    â€œWhat happened to you?” I asked him. “No Wall Street Journal?”
    â€œIt’s a girl,” he said.
    â€œI know,” I said. “I was there.”
    I was in a pleasant, clean room. There was no doubt that it was all over; I could see my feet under the bedspread.
    â€œIt’s a girl,” I said to my husband.
    The door opened and the doctor came in. “Well,” he said. “How do we feel?”
    â€œFine,” I said. “It’s a girl.”
    â€œI know,” he said.
    The door was still open and a face peered around it. My husband, the doctor, and I, all turned happily to look. It was the woman in the blue bathrobe.
    â€œHad it yet?” I asked her.
    â€œNo,” she said. “You?”
    â€œYep,” I said. “You going home again?”
    â€œListen,” she said. “I been thinking. Home, the kids all yelling and my mother looking sad like she’s disappointed in me. Like I did something. My husband, every time he sees me jump he reaches for the car keys. My sister, she calls me every day and if I answer the phone she hangs up. Here, I get three meals a day I don’t cook, I know all the nurses, and I meet a lot of people going in and out. I figure I’d be a fool to go home. What was it, girl or boy?”
    â€œGirl,” I said.
    â€œGirl,” she said. “They say the third’s the easiest.”

TWO
    I BELIEVE THAT all women, but especially housewives, tend to think in lists; I have always believed, against all opposition, that women think in logical sequence, but it was not until I came to empty the pockets of my light summer coat that year that I realized how thoroughly the housekeeping mind falls into the list pattern, how basically the idea of a series of items, following one another docilely, forms the only possible reasonable approach to life if you have to live it with a home and a husband and children, none of whom would dream of following one another docilely. What started me thinking about it was the little slips of paper I found in the pockets of my light summer coat, one beginning “cereal, shoes to shop, bread, cheese, peanut butter, evening paper, doz doughnuts, CALL PICTURE.” I showed this list to my husband, and he read it twice and said it didn’t make any sense. When I told him that it made perfect sense because it followed my route up one side of the main street of our town and down the other side—I have to buy the cereal at a special store, because that’s the only one which carries the kind the children like—he said then what did CALL PICTURE mean? and when I explained that it meant I must call the picture-framer before I started out and was in big letters because if I took the list out in the store and found I had forgotten to call the picture-framer I would then have to stop in and see him, he sniffed and said if he managed his filing cabinet the way I managed my shopping. . . . The other list I found in my summer coat pocket started out “summer coat to clnrs.”
    The fact that I hadn’t taken my summer coat to the cleaners (oh, those first fall days, with the sad sharpness in the air and the leaves bright so that our road is a line of color, and the feeling of storing-in against the winter, and