Come Along with Me by Shirley Jackson

Author:Shirley Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-02-12T16:00:00+00:00

A DAY IN THE JUNGLE

The whole performance of the first two hours was so shockingly, so abominably, easy, that her only vivid feeling about it was surprise that the institution of marriage might pretend to be stable upon such elusive foundations, as though the humiliation of the wedding and the bad dreams of the long nights and the hideous unprivate months were an end and not a means, as though two people sought one another out for no more than this, this surprise that it should all be so easy to leave one another. The other, fainter, emotion, hidden far beneath the surprise, she refused to identify as any kind of fear, but called it excitement instead.

It had been most pleasant packing her suitcase, consciously choosing those clothes she would not ordinarily wear in the middle of the week, the nice dresses and the good suit and—with a distant humorous nod at the popular interpretation of what her position was to be—her black evening dress, and the few pieces of really good jewelry she owned, thinking that perhaps she might not have another chance at her clothes, that they might be packed up and sent her, perhaps, or lumped in with other possessions and sold (item: one blue-and-green print house dress, coffee stain on right sleeve, two small safety pins on lapel) and wondering, briefly, if the nicely chosen, not expensive shoes and the hat so suitable for lunching with other young matrons might, after all, suit her now, since they had so obviously been bought from and for a married state. The suitcase had gone with her on her honeymoon and afterward on the vacations and incidental week ends in the country and to the hospital where she lost the baby, and had its accustomed place, much more than she had herself, on the top closet shelf; taking it down was in itself an act of departure, dusting it, opening it to the scent of her traveling cologne, its reminiscence of trains, of hotel desks, of distant parts. She was able to get everything in, remembering handkerchiefs, toothbrush, stockings from the rack in the bathroom, which she had washed last night before it was clearly evident that she was leaving, and she had rinsed and hung them up innocently, as though she might never be going away again.

She had been very angry while she washed her stockings, and angry when she finished the dinner dishes and angry even before that, having her dinner alone, and the fact that he did not come home at all had not made her any the less angry, waiting there in her chair by the radio planning neat bitter things to say to him. (“Do you expect a wife to sit alone night after . . .” “If you prefer the company of your friends to . . .” “Before we were married you used to . . .”) The phrasing of a note to him had been still another pleasure, since she knew by then that she was leaving and could say anything she pleased.

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