Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson

Author:Shirley Jackson [Jackson, Shirley]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-04-05T21:00:00+00:00

Three

Sometimes, in my capacity as mother, I find myself sitting open-mouthed and terrified before my own children, little individual creatures moving solidly along in their own paths and yet in some mysterious manner vividly reminiscent of a past which my husband and I know we have never communicated to them; I remember the little shock of familiarity I felt when I first saw Jannie skip down the front walk, and the sense of lost years slipping past, unrealized, when Laurie came home chanting “O U T spells out, and out you go, down to the bottom of the deep blue sea with a dirty dishrag turned inside out,” although there was a heated family discussion about the second line of “Ibbitty, Bibbitty, Sibbitty, Sab,” because Laurie believed that it went “Ibbitty, bibbitty, conoso,” and I said it was “conothco,” and my husband said it was “Ibbitty, bibbitty, canarsie,” and it reminded me of the little idiocy which went “Laurie bumbaurie tiliaurie gosaurie,” although my husband said that that one ended “gotaurie.” Sally discovered in herself the ability to chant that most basic and most jeering of childhood tunes, the “da, da, da-da, da,” or “I know a secret,” melody; Laurie began collecting pictures of baseball players, which came enclosed in packages of bubble gum; in my day they used to be in packages of licorice. The candy cigarette turned up, and the chocolate apple; they no longer give away baseball bats with pairs of new shoes, but Buster Brown still grins with his dog from the soles. A whole section of forgotten past came back, for instance, one evening when Laurie remarked joyfully that a house near the school had a ghost in it and none of the kids from school would walk past it, although one intrepid adventurer named Oliver maintained that he had been inside and had of course seen the ghost, and “Boy,” Laurie said with reminiscent pleasure, “was he scared!”

My husband and I looked at one another; in my case it was a house on the next block—the one next to the vacant lot—and the boy who said he had been inside was named Andy Young (how is it that I have not forgotten Andy Young in all these years?) and my husband remembered that there was a shack at the back of the school yard which had a ghost in it and that one Louie Fair had been inside. In all cases the punchline of the story was precisely, “Boy, was he scared!” My husband and I found ourselves repeating the same amused platitudes about boys who went into haunted houses that our parents had used to us, Laurie retorted that everyone knew this house was haunted and he bet we wouldn’t go inside, and there was a familiar split-second hesitation before my husband and I answered, in chorus, that certainly we would go inside, if it were not that the house belonged to someone else who would presumably resent our entering without permission. Laurie

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.