Free Raising Demons by Shirley Jackson Page A

that way to a lady you had better think again because I am right now going out to tell everyone I know in town that the E. J. Cobb Storage and Transfer Company not only steals furniture entrusted to them for storage and breaks and smashes everything but they also yell curses and obscenity at people just trying to get their furniture back and by the time I finish with you you will regard yourself as extremely fortunate if they let you out of jail long enough to fire Freddie, because I personally am going to—”
    â€œYour three minutes are up,” said the operator.
    I still had a good deal I wanted to tell Mr. Cobb, but when I went to get more nickels the ticket agent peered out at me from the back of the ticket booth, and shook his head no. I got back into the car and drove to our new house, where I found that my husband and the children were sitting on cartons of books and eating potato chips. My husband said that they were trying to decide what to name Jannie’s new room and Laurie’s new room, since Jannie and Laurie were going to share the upstairs back apartment, and each of them would thus have a small bedroom and a larger room for other activities and there was quite a problem in thinking of names for these larger rooms. Laurie thought he would like to call his room Laurie’s Laboratory, because since it had formerly been a kitchen he could keep the sink in and do chemistry there and maybe set up a darkroom to develop pictures and we could get him a microscope. Jannie wanted to call hers a Study so she could study there, but my husband said that
he
had a study, and two studies would be confusing, and he suggested that she put her books in there and call it Jannie’s Library. I said she could call it her salon, and Laurie said a salon was not a nice name for a room where a little girl kept her books, but she could call it Jannie’s Joint. Sally said why not put her bed in there, bed, and then she could call it her bedroom? Or, Laurie thought, she could call it her Giggle Room, because that was all she ever did, anyway.
    Jannie, who had been for the past ten days engaged in running one joke into the ground, said smartly that Laurie’s room, then, should be called Laurie’s Stable, and he could keep a horse in there, and besides, it always looked like a stable. She was going on to elaborate this last point when a moving truck stopped in front of the house and began a complicated maneuver to enable it to back across the rhododendron bush beside the front steps. We all went to the front door and a man got down from the truck. From his voice and general air of graceful self-possession I strongly suspected that it might be Freddie. He removed his hat respectfully and remarked that he hoped he had gotten the right house. My husband said never mind about the right house; if that was furniture in that truck we would take it. Freddie said that Ed hoped we weren’t going to be sore at him, because they had certainly meant to deliver our furniture today and had even gotten this small truck loaded, so Ed decided that they should bring over what they had, just so’s we could have some furniture in the house tonight, and they would bring over the rest tomorrow, absolutely, on Ed’s personal word of honor, or the next day at the very latest.
    We explained that due to certain obstructive difficulties in our house it was going to be necessary to take some of the furniture to the upstairs front apartment and some around to the back entrance and up the back stairs to the upstairs back apartment, and that the furniture in the downstairs front was going to have to be very carefully spaced so that the weight of the furniture and books would not go through the floor. Freddie said he understood perfectly. The first thing that came off the truck was my husband’s workbench, which the men carried out back to the barn. Then came Laurie’s bicycle and Jannie’s and Sally’s