The Lottery and Other Stories (17 page)

“What are they doing?” I whispered.

“They’re just sitting there,” Dot said. “What do you think I ought to do?”

I leaned cautiously around Dot and looked. “Don’t pay any attention,” I said. “Maybe they’ll go away.”

“
You
can talk,” Dot said tragically, “they’re not next to
you
.”

“I’m next to
you
,” I said reasonably, “that’s pretty close.”

“What are they doing now?” Dot asked.

I leaned forward again. “They’re looking at the picture,” I said.

“I can’t stand it,” Dot said. “I want to go home.”

Panic overwhelmed both of us at once, and fortunately my mother and my grandmother saw us running up the aisle and caught us outside.

“What did they say?” my grandmother demanded. “I’ll tell the usher.”

My mother said if Dot would calm down enough to talk she would take us into the tea room next door and get us each a hot chocolate. When we got inside and were sitting down we told my mother and my grandmother we were fine now and instead of a hot chocolate we would have a chocolate sundae apiece. Dot had even started to cheer up a little when the door of the tea room opened and two sailors walked in. With one wild bound Dot was in back of my grandmother’s chair, cowering and clutching my grandmother’s arm. “Don’t let them get me,” she wailed.

“They followed us,” my mother said tautly.

My grandmother put her arms around Dot. “Poor child,” she said, “you’re safe with us.”

Dot had to stay at my house that night. We sent my brother over to Dot’s mother to tell her that Dot was staying with me and that Dot had bought a grey tweed coat with princess lines, very practical and warmly interlined. She wore it all that year.

The Confession of
Margaret Jackson
, relict of
Tho. Stuart
in
Shaws
, who being examined by the Justices anent her being guilty of Witchcraft, declares…That forty years ago, or thereabout, she was at
Pollockshaw-croft
, with some few sticks on her back, and that the black Man came to her, and that she did give up herself unto the black Man, from the top of her head to the sole of her foot; and that this was after the Declarant’s renouncing of her Baptism; and that the Spirit’s name, which he designed her, was
Locas
. And that about the third or fourth of
January
, instant, or thereby, in the night-time, when she awaked, she found a Man to be in bed with her, whom she supposed to be her Husband; though her Husband had been dead twenty years, or thereby, and that the Man immediately disappeared: And declares, That this Man who disappeared was the Devil.

Joseph Glanvil:
Sadducismus Triumphatus

Colloquy

T
HE DOCTOR
was competent-looking and respectable. Mrs. Arnold felt vaguely comforted by his appearance, and her agitation lessened a little. She knew that he noticed her hand shaking when she leaned forward for him to light her cigarette, and she smiled apologetically, but he looked back at her seriously.

“You seem to be upset,” he said gravely.

“I’m very much upset,” Mrs. Arnold said. She tried to talk slowly and intelligently. “That’s one reason I came to you instead of going to Doctor Murphy—our regular doctor, that is.”

The doctor frowned slightly. “My husband,” Mrs. Arnold went on. “I don’t want him to know that I’m worried, and Doctor Murphy would probably feel it was necessary to tell him.” The doctor nodded, not committing himself, Mrs. Arnold noted.

“What seems to be the trouble?”

Mrs. Arnold took a deep breath. “Doctor,” she said, “how do people tell if they’re going crazy?”

The doctor looked up.

“Isn’t that silly,” Mrs. Arnold said. “I hadn’t meant to say it like that. It’s hard enough to explain anyway, without making it so dramatic.”

“Insanity is more complicated than you think,” the doctor said.

“I
know
it’s complicated,” Mrs. Arnold said. “That’s the only thing I’m really
sure
of. Insanity is one of the things I mean.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“That’s my trouble, Doctor.” Mrs. Arnold sat back and took her gloves out from under her pocketbook and put them carefully on top. Then she took them and put them underneath the pocketbook again.

“Suppose you just tell me all about it,” the doctor said.

Mrs. Arnold sighed. “Everyone else seems to understand,” she said, “and I don’t. Look.” She leaned forward and gestured with one hand while she spoke. “I don’t understand the way people live. It all used to be so simple. When I was a little girl I used to live in a world where a lot of other people lived too and they all lived together and things went along like that with no fuss.” She looked at the doctor. He was frowning again, and Mrs. Arnold went on, her voice rising slightly. “Look. Yesterday morning my husband stopped on his way to his office to buy a paper. He always buys the
Times
and he always buys it from the same dealer, and yesterday the dealer didn’t have a
Times
for my husband and last night when he came home for dinner he said the fish was burned and the dessert was too sweet and he sat around all evening talking to himself.”

“He could have tried to get it at another dealer,” the doctor said. “Very often dealers downtown have papers later than local dealers.”

“No,” Mrs. Arnold said, slowly and distinctly, “I guess I’d better start over. When I was a little girl—” she said. Then she stopped. “Look,” she said, “did there use to be words like psychosomatic medicine? Or international cartels? Or bureaucratic centralization?”

“Well,” the doctor began.

“What do they
mean?
” Mrs. Arnold insisted.

“In a period of international crisis,” the doctor said gently, “when you find, for instance, cultural patterns rapidly disintegrating…”

“International crisis,” Mrs. Arnold said. “Patterns.” She began to cry quietly. “He said the man had no
right
not to save him a
Times
,” she said hysterically, fumbling in her pocket for a handkerchief, “and he started talking about social planning on the local level and surtax net income and geopolitical concepts and deflationary inflation.” Mrs. Arnold’s voice rose to a wail. “He really said deflationary inflation.”

“Mrs. Arnold,” the doctor said, coming around the desk, “we’re not going to help things any this way.”

“What is going to help?” Mrs. Arnold said. “Is everyone really crazy but me?”

“Mrs. Arnold,” the doctor said severely, “I want you to get hold of yourself. In a disoriented world like ours today, alienation from reality frequently—”

“Disoriented,” Mrs. Arnold said. She stood up. “Alienation,” she said. “Reality.” Before the doctor could stop her she walked to the door and opened it. “Reality,” she said, and went out.

Elizabeth

J
UST BEFORE
the alarm went off she was lying in a hot sunny garden, with green lawns around her and stretching as far as she could see. The bell of the clock was an annoyance, a warning which had to be reckoned with; she moved uneasily in the hot sun and knew she was awake. When she opened her eyes and it was raining and she saw the white outline of the window against the grey sky, she tried to turn over and bury her face in the green grass, but it was morning and habit was lifting her up and dragging her away into the rainy dull day.

It was definitely past eight o’clock. The clock said so, the radiator was beginning to crackle, and on the street two stories below she could hear the ugly morning noises of people stirring, getting out to work. She put her feet reluctantly out from under the blankets and on to the floor, and swung herself up to sit on the edge of the bed. By the time she was standing up and in her bathrobe the day had fallen into its routine; after the first involuntary rebellion against every day’s alarm she subsided regularly into the shower, make-up, dress, breakfast schedule which would take her through the beginning of the day and out into the morning where she could forget the green grass and the hot sun and begin to look forward to dinner and the evening.

Because it was raining and the day seemed unimportant she put on the first things she came to; a grey tweed suit that she knew was shapeless and heavy on her now that she was so thin, a blue blouse that never felt comfortable. She knew her own face too well to enjoy the long careful scrutiny that went with putting on make-up; toward four o’clock in the afternoon her pale narrow cheeks would warm up and fill out, and the lipstick that looked too purple with her dark hair and eyes would take on a rosier touch in spite of the blue blouse, but this morning she thought, as she had thought nearly every morning standing in front of her mirror, I wish I’d been a blonde; never realizing quite that it was because there were thin hints of grey in her hair.

She walked quickly around her one-room apartment, with a sureness that came of habit rather than conviction; after more than four years in this one home she knew all its possibilities, how it could put on a sham appearance of warmth and welcome when she needed a place to hide in, how it stood over her in the night when she woke suddenly, how it could relax itself into a disagreeable unmade, badly-put-together state, mornings like this, anxious to drive her out and go back to sleep. The book she had read the night before lay face down on the end table, the ashtray next to it dirtied: the clothes she had taken off lay over the back of a chair, to be taken to the cleaner this morning.

With her coat and hat on, she made the bed quickly, pulling it straight on top over the wrinkles beneath, stuffed the clothes to go to the cleaner into the back of the closet, and thought, I’ll dust and straighten and maybe wash the bathroom tonight, come home and take a hot bath and wash my hair and do my nails; by the time she had locked the apartment door behind her and started down the stairs, she was thinking, Maybe today I’ll stop in and get some bright material for slip-covers and drapes. I could make them evenings and the place wouldn’t look so dreary when I wake up mornings; yellow, I could get some yellow dishes and put them along the wall in a row. Like in
Mademoiselle
or something, she told herself ironically as she stopped at the front door, the brisk young businesswoman and her one-room home. Suitable for entertaining brisk young businessmen. I wish I had something that folded up into a bookcase on one side and a Sheraton desk on the other and opened out into a dining-room table big enough to seat twelve.

While she was standing just inside the door, pulling on her gloves and hoping the rain might stop in these few seconds, the door next to the stairway opened and a woman said, “Who’s that?”

“It’s Miss Style,” she said, “Mrs. Anderson?”

The door opened wide and an old woman put her head out. “I thought it was that fellow has the apartment right over you,” she said. “I been meaning to catch him about leaving them skis outside his door. Nearly broke my leg.”

“I’ve been wishing I didn’t have to go out. It’s such a bad day.”

The old woman came out of her room and went to the front door. She pulled aside the door curtain and looked out, wrapping her arms around herself. She was wearing a dirty house dress and the sight of her made Miss Style’s grey tweed suit suddenly seem clean and warm.

“I been trying to catch that fellow for two days now,” the old woman said. “He goes in and out so quiet.” She giggled, looking sideways at Miss Style. “I nearly caught that man of yours night before last,” she said. “He comes down the stairs quiet, too. I saw who it was in time,” and she giggled again. “I guess all the men come downstairs quiet. All afraid of something.”

“Well, if I’m going to go out I might as well do it,” Miss Style said. She still stood in the doorway for a minute, hesitating before walking out into the day and the rain and the people. She lived on a fairly quiet street, where later there would be children shouting at each other and on a nice day an organ-grinder, but today in the rain everything looked dirty. She hated to wear rubbers because she had graceful slim feet; on a day like this she went slowly, stepping carefully between puddles.