This was first published in a collection with the more famous ‘The Lottery’, and to my mind is more indicative of Jackson’s usual style: that of a deep-seated, but creeping rather than overt, weirdness that leaks into everyday life. It also features the recurring character, James Harris, which appeals to my taste for closed worlds.
The story concerns a man who is inviting his neighbour to dinner. David is very conscious of his material surroundings. He takes a very active pleasure in the appearance of his apartment, “the most comfortable home he had ever had,” and over his successes in finding exactly the furnishings he wanted. There are some things he still wants, and he has had to choose between getting a particular kind of vase, and continuing to buy the silverware he has “[g]radually, tenderly” been buying. He is troubled by the falling plaster in his bedroom that “no power on earth” could make less noticeable, but his concern is easily balanced by the comforts and reassurances of his “warm, fine home.” His less-organised neighbour, Marcia, is to be his guest for dinner. The exact nature of their relationship is not exactly clear; he has a key to her apartment for practical reasons (like letting in the laundry-man) and she has none to his, but when he leaves a note for her, he signs it ‘D’, suggesting long familiarity. Her apartment very nearly distresses him because it is so untidy.
Marcia, when she arrives, is disruptive in every way—loud, late, informal, wearing a dirty coat, and calling him “Davie”—but he enjoys her great appreciation of his home, the dinner, and the table-settings. She seems to show signs of coveting aspects of David’s approach to life—“Someone should teach me, I guess”—and then the fatal disruption happens.
Jackson excels in a sort of inevitable terribleness that dominates on arrival, so that characters have just registered the reality when it is too late to do anything about it. Sometimes (as in ‘Pillar of Salt’) it is their environment that turns against them, but here it is people who shift without warning and inexorably from the background to the foreground. Marcia’s colleague, James Harris, calls to see her, and she invites him into David’s home. Instantly, David’s possession of his home is undermined by the very means by which he created its security and comfort, and through which he expresses not only his personality, but his agency. Within a few apparently innocuous lines of social chit-chat, this agency is excised, and David’s position echoes that of Mrs Hart in ‘Men with Their Big Shoes’, who “realized with a sudden unalterable conviction that she was lost”.
Published in The Lottery and Other Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1949; now in a Penguin Modern Classics edition, 2009
A Personal Anthology 