Come Along with Me by Shirley Jackson Page A

farmhouse that was lonely enough to make some sort of company a welcome necessity. She had carefully told them in the First National store in town: “I want a girl who can take care of Tommy, who can cook and clean a little, and who isn’t scared of the dark. A
nice
girl,” she had added hopefully. “The nicer the better.”
    Tootie was the first and only applicant. She arrived at Julie’s house one morning, with a suitcase in her hand, and rang the doorbell emphatically. “You Miz Taylor?” she demanded when I opened the door. I shook my head helplessly. Tootie stood not quite five feet tall in her summer sandals, but she had arranged to add another three inches to her height by a complicated coiffure of curls and hair ribbons which made her look like a badly sketched perfume ad. She was wearing a house dress somehow too small for her, held together loosely with pins at the sides, and her arms dangled down to her knees, with bright red fingernails glittering as she waved her suitcase at me. “I come to stay here,” she said. “Like Miz Taylor wanted.”
    As I stood back for her to come in—there was nothing I could think of to say, with that coiffure catching me somewhere about the chin—I saw that her toenails, too, were bright red. “Tommy will love her,” I thought, “just simply love her.” “Sit down,” I said, and she put down her suitcase and sat down, crossing her legs the way they do in the movies.
    â€œLet’s have a cigarette?” she said. I gave her one.
    â€œMrs. Taylor isn’t here right now,” I began, “but she ought to be back any minute. Meanwhile suppose you just tell me about yourself and I can probably let you know whether you’ll be satisfactory or not.”
    She looked at me suspiciously. “Miz Taylor say it’s all right for you to talk to anyone that comes?” I nodded. “Well,” she said, “I got a boy friend. That be all right with Miz Taylor?”
    â€œI should think so, if you didn’t want to take too many evenings off. But suppose you tell me your name, first.”
    â€œTootie Maple,” she said. “His name’s Bud. He works nights, though, so we go for rides in the afternoons. He has a car, a Chevvy, and it’ll do fifty if he pushes her up.”
    â€œI see. Have you ever had any experience with children? Mrs. Taylor has a two-year-old baby boy you’ll have to—”
    â€œThat ain’t a baby. That’s a kid. I took care of m’whole damn family. Guess I can handle this one. He much of a brat?”
    I thought of peaceful little Tommy. “Not much,” I said.
    â€œSure,” Tootie told me, waving a set of those fingernails, “I can handle him fine. Pot?” she demanded.
    â€œI beg your pardon?”
    â€œI say, does he go on a pot, or—”
    â€œYou’ll have to ask Mrs. Taylor about all that,” I said firmly. “Let me see—can you cook?”
    â€œNever tried,” Tootie said.
    By the time Julie came home I had discovered that Tootie could not wash clothes (“Never tried”), could not wash dishes (“At least, not a
lot
of dishes all at once”), was not afraid to stay alone with the baby at night (“Me scared? Of the
dark
? Jeez!”), and never bathed during the summertime. All this I told Julie in a sort of hurried whisper in the hall. I will never know how much of it she understood, because the next thing I heard, Tootie was hired, to come to work the following Monday morning.
    â€œIt’s just got to be
some
body,” Julie said weakly after Tootie had left, storing her suitcase suspiciously in Julie’s guest room. “Maybe she’s sort of wonderful with children.”
    â€œShe looked a little bit . . . backwoods New Hampshire, don’t you think?” I asked, carefully regarding my cigarette.
    â€œSort of . . .