Wake Up With a Stranger

by Flora, Fletcher

  “I wasn’t happy in it. I was damn miserable in it, as you know very well, but I’ve told you and told you that it wasn’t your fault. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d have gone long before I did. We’ve been over and over this, Mother, and I absolutely won’t discuss it again, so let’s please drop it right now or I’ll leave.”

  She looked at her mother’s face and quickly away, for she could never look at her long without ambivalence. It made her feel at once sad and contemptuous, and the reason was that her mother had been a beautiful woman and had not deserved to be. How in God’s name could a woman who had been beautiful and reasonably intelligent have made such a drab mess of her life? And the most depressing thing of all was that her mother was not actually aware of the mess. She had been beautiful and intelligent, and she had wasted all of what she had been on a ridiculous ineffective who should have been discarded ages ago, and this depressing and senseless waste had happened simply because she was totally incapable of facing the truth about anything, because she had no guts, and she damn well deserved the consequences of not having any.

  “I wish you wouldn’t be so cross, dear,” her mother said. “And that reminds me. I’ve been wanting to speak to you about your father. I know he’s very irritating to you, but do you think you could just try a little harder to get along with him?”

  “All Father has to do to get along with me is to mind his own damn business.”

  “Well, that’s just what I mean. Don’t you see, dear, that Father considers that you are his business? He only tries to think of what is good for you.”

  “Oh, hell. That kind of talk makes me sick. Whatever in my life has been done for my good has been done by you, or I have done it for myself. The truth is that Father has been a damn detriment to both of us, and you know it, and he has never done a thing that entitles him to any authority at all in my affairs. I tell you I don’t wish to talk about him any more, now or ever, and if you don’t stop dragging him up every time I’m here, I swear to God I’ll leave and never come back.”

  “All right, dear, all right. I don’t want to make you angry.”

  “Damn it to hell, I am not angry.”

  “Do you have to swear so much?”

  “I’m sorry. The truth is, something has happened that worries me.”

  “Are you in trouble?”

  “No. Not exactly. At least, I don’t think so. Where’s Father now?”

  “Why, I was just going to tell you, dear. He’s not at home. Only last week he took this selling job that keeps him out of town part of the time.”

  “You mean he wasn’t home last night?”

  “No, dear. He’s been gone since last Thursday. He’ll be back tomorrow, I think, if you want to see him.”

  “I don’t want to see him. I’m just glad he wasn’t here last night.”

  “That’s a strange thing to say about your father, dear. Why are you glad?”

  “Because I want you to promise to do something for me, and it will be better if he doesn’t know anything about it. If I ask you to do something for me that may seem rather strange, will you do it?”

  “Of course, dear. If I can. You know I always try to do anything for you that I can.”

  “I know, Mother. You’ve always been very good to me. It’s really not so much to ask, after all. I only want you to promise to say that I spent last night here if anyone should ask you.”

  “To lie, dear? Why ever should you want me to do that?”

  “Well, let’s not get heavy about the lying, Mother. Chances are you won’t have to say anything at all, but if you should, I want you to say that I was here. Will you do it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t like to tell lies unless it’s absolutely necessary. You will have to tell me why you want me to say you were here when you really weren’t.”

  Donna lit a cigarette and sat looking at her mother through the thin smoke between them. She had thought that it might be possible to arrange things without a confession, but now she saw that it wouldn’t. Besides, she felt suddenly a rather perverse desire to be perfectly honest, not so much for the sake of honesty as for the sake of honesty’s capacity to shock and disturb.

  “Aaron’s dead,” she said.

  “Aaron? Mr. Burns? The Aaron Burns you work for?”

  “That’s right. He died in his home last night, or perhaps early this morning, and that’s why I want you to say I was here. It might ruin me if I were to become involved, and at the very least it would be unpleasant.”

  “Involved? I don’t understand what you mean by becoming involved. For God’s sake, you didn’t have anything to do with his death, did you?”

  “Oh God, Mother, will you please stop being so tragic? I already have enough to bear without this in addition. I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you mean, and I didn’t contribute to his death indirectly, either. He had a heart condition. He simply died some time while I was asleep. Sometime in the night or early morning.”

  “You spent the night with him?”

  “Yes. I have spent many nights with him.”

  “Oh, Donna, Donna! So your father was right after all! Sleeping with a married man, living like a — ”

  “Stop it, Mother! Stop it immediately! And if you say anything against Aaron, one damn word, I’ll never speak to you again. Do you understand? He was kind and generous and gentle, which I am not and can never be, and we were good for each other. You needn’t expect me to be ashamed of anything I have done. Do you think I will feel like a criminal because I committed adultery? Well, there was something between us that was what we both needed, and whatever it was, it was good. And I will tell you that it was infinitely more moral, if you are concerned about my morals, than the sour cohabitation that you and Father have been engaged in for as long as I can remember.”

  She had not intended to be so cruel, and she regretted at once that she had been. Sucking smoke into her lungs, she expelled it with a long exhalation and watched the slow crumbling and complete dissolution of the vestiges of beauty in her mother’s face.

  “Don’t cry,” she said. “Damn it to hell, please don’t cry.”

  Standing up abruptly, sickened by ambivalence, she walked out of the living room and through the dining room into the kitchen. On the range was an aluminum pot half full of cold coffee. Lighting the burner under the pot, she stood watching it while the coffee heated. As she stood and watched she began to think with clarity of her position and all that stood in the balance now that Aaron was dead. Here in the ugly house she loathed, in the smell and the shadow of the life she had escaped, she was morbidly aware of what she stood to lose, the shop and her job and all that they entailed and promised. It was not fair after she had schemed and worked so long and so hard, it was simply the rottenest piece of goddamn luck at just the time when everything was going so beautifully. Suddenly, to Aaron, wherever he was, her mind cried out a thin, irrational indictment of betrayal.

  Why did you have to die? she thought. Oh, why in hell did you have to die?

  CHAPTER II

  One of Donna’s earliest recollections in the area of inceptive light, where remembrance survived in scattered oddments, was the sound of a sewing machine. In the beginning there was one kind of sound, and a little later there was a slightly different kind of sound, and this change occurred when her mother’s old treadle-driven machine was traded in for one with an electric motor. She was sorry to see the old machine go, for the treadle had fascinated her, and she had become quite proficient at working it with her hands while sitting on the floor and looking across under the golden oak cabinet at her mother’s knees. Her mother was glad to be thus relieved of the labor of pumping, and it was pleasant on the floor with her head full of the incisive sound, and the bright fabrics sometimes tumbling over the edge of the machine and behind her to form a kind of silk or cotton or warm wool tent. The old machine was a Bartlett and the new one was a Singer. She remembered the name of the old one quite clearly because it was spelled out in
iron letters between iron legs in a shallow arc that served as a brace. The name was also spelled out on the treadle, which consisted of a kind of intricate filigree around the name inside a rectangular iron frame.

  A significant oddment was Mrs. Kullen. Mrs. Kullen’s husband was a meat cutter who had acquired his own market, and one of the benefits deriving from her marriage to this prosperous merchant was solvency sufficient for the hiring of a seamstress to modify her fat butt. There were other women who came to the cramped and narrow house for fittings, and some of them were even remembered for a while after they ceased to come, but it was Mrs. Kullen who became and remained the gross symbol of oppression, the prototype in Donna’s mind of those who become dominant through a distortion of values.

  Her mother was then beautiful, and employed a fine talent, and those who came to her should have come for favor and not for service, but this was not so. It was perfectly apparent that her mother was considered by these dull and demanding women to be little more than a menial, and it was her mother’s fault, because she was weak and submissive and did not know how to utilize her own superiority. And it was in Donna the beginning of the ambivalence on the one hand, toward her mother, and concentrated contempt on the other, toward all of those for whom Mrs. Kullen stood. And Mrs. Kullen stood for them in her corset. She stood in the room in a slant of sun among a myriad of particles of suspended dust, and the angle of the narrow band of light fell across her fat white downy thighs between her corset and her stockings. This was Donna’s first sight of her, or at least the sight which assumed precedence over all others in time and intensity, and it was the way, the only way, she was ever able to see her afterward in her mind.

  For quite a while she seemed to share the house only with her mother and the machine and occasionally the women who came for fittings, and then all of a sudden, emerging from darkness as if he had been gone since her birth and had just returned, there was Wayne Buchanan, her father. It was not true that he had been gone, of course. He was there all the time from the beginning, but for some reason that she could not determine he was excluded from her earlier recollections. Neither could she determine why it was that he took his place so abruptly at the time that he did, but he must have been brought into focus by something unpleasant, something now forgotten that he said or did, for he took shape in an animus that was never overcome. Surely she had formerly felt some affection for him, or had accepted him at least with a kind of tolerance, but the feeling was extinct, if it had existed at all, before it had left a trace in her mind.

  Wayne Buchanan was a tall man with heavy shoulders, handsome in a rather florid fashion. Later, when Donna was studying history in school, she thought that he actually resembled the Buchanan who had been fifteenth President of the United States, and this was ironic, besides being a coincidence of names and appearance, because the other Buchanan had been weak and a failure too. He had been, however, a failure on a high level, which was one thing, while Wayne Buchanan was a failure on a low level, which was quite another. He had somehow decided that selling was the thing he did best, and he was always leaving one job for another which promised to be better. But the promise was never kept, and he accomplished so many minor failures in such rapid succession that they seemed to combine in retrospect into one big indivisible failure together, which was really what they amounted to. Not that he looked or acted like the failure he was. His appearance remained impressive, and he supported his natural weakness with a rigidity of attitude that obscured the weakness as it supported it, and it was this rigidity that prevented him from disintegrating entirely.

  He was known as a religious man. He said grace at the table and took his wife and daughter every Sunday to church, and because he had no confidence in his own moral stamina, he was particularly critical of the morals of others, and wished to impose upon them dogmas of belief and behavior that they did not wish to adopt for themselves. Donna did not object to grace or church, the truth being that she rather enjoyed these things for the comfortable feeling that they gave her for a short time afterward, nor did she object strenuously to continual admonitions to be a good girl, for she had no active intention of being anything else. What she objected to and despised was her father’s propensity for making formulistic goodness a substitute for genuine devotion and for the capacity to do anything whatever that amounted to a damn. She understood with a kind of childish insight that a person who does not feel himself successful has much to gain from believing himself good, and she might have tolerated this in a more casual relationship. But she could not tolerate it in a relationship which was supposed to invoke respect, if not love, and she never did.

  Besides being basically a fraud, Wayne Buchanan was something of a sadist. In a petty way, of course, as was appropriate for a weak man. He enjoyed denying Donna the things she could have had, and he enjoyed prohibiting her things she could have done. Many things were denied her, it was true, because Buchanan never had very much money and simply could not afford to supply them, and this was a valid reason for denial that Donna would have accepted if it had ever been offered, but it wasn’t. Buchanan was constitutionally incapable of making such a simple admission, for it would have seemed to him a confession of impotence. His denials were always accompanied by some pompous hocus-pocus intended to make Donna believe that they were for her own benefit, as if not having whatever she wanted was necessarily good for her character, while having it would necessarily be bad. His phoniness in this respect was clearly evident, even to a child, and as she grew older — Donna the girl becoming Donna the woman — she learned to avoid the revolting routine by asking him at first for nothing she wanted and, a little later, by honestly not wanting anything he had to give.

  Although she did not have as much as many children have when they are growing up, she always had, because of her mother’s talent and trade, all the pretty dresses that she could wear, and this was very important to a pretty girl. Her mother bought fabric at a remnant shop for a fraction of its regular cost, but it was good material that was only marked down because it was the last of a bolt or dye lot or of a pattern that was being discontinued. On Donna the finished dresses her mother made had a look of quality that more expensive dresses did not have on other girls. In the beginning, that is, the material was bought and the dresses made by the mother for the daughter, but after a while the buying and the making were done by the daughter for herself, who had, besides her mother’s skill with the machine, a better eye for color and its ultimate effect in design, and, most of all, a sure feeling for the design itself — whether it was right or wrong and why. Long before she took her correspondence course, she was making sketches in a cheap tablet and cutting patterns from newspapers.

  Being pretty, and wearing with a flair her pretty dresses, she was attractive to boys, but she wasn’t particularly popular. There is a legitimate distinction here, of course — and if she was glad of the one, she was undisturbed by the other, for the truth was that boys interested her mildly but not excessively, and she had not yet reached the point where she found them useful.

  Her first intimate experience was with a quite small boy, when she herself was quite small, and it didn’t amount to much. He was called Dinky, and he lived for a while with his father and mother and six brothers and sisters in a house three doors away. She played with him sometimes in her back yard or his, and one day they went down into the cellar under his house and explored each other’s areas of difference with curiosity. It seemed a natural enough thing to do, and not too disappointing on the whole. She probably would have been willing to repeat the performance if circumstances had fallen out right for it, but unfortunately Dinky’s family was dispossessed within the week for nonpayment of rent, and he moved away with his father and mother and six brothers and sisters, and she never saw him again. She thought about him for a while, but she didn’t miss him. Once she tried to remember his last name and couldn’t, and this caused her to wonder if she had actually ever known it, but she couldn’t remember that
either.

  After Dinky, who hardly counted, she grew older, and she knew other boys who also hardly counted, and then when she was fifteen and had not yet decided what kind of person she wanted to be — or rather had not become aware of the kind of person she had to be — there was a boy named David who counted very much and was always remembered and regretted, not for what he was or had or did, but simply because he became an issue over which her father made a fool of himself and of her in the most disgusting way.

  She went with this boy to what was called a formal dance — formal meant only that the girls wore long gowns and the boys wore the best they had, whatever that was. The dance was held in the gymnasium of the high school, and Donna wasn’t especially eager to go, but when this boy named David asked her, she decided that she would. He was a handsome boy with light curly hair — but he was not so conceited as many boys who thought they were exceptional merely because they were good-looking — and he was in love with her at the time, though she was not in love with him. His being in love with her made her feel important and fairly responsive.

  It was quite a distance from her home to the high school, but they walked there, having no other way of getting there, and after the dance was over at eleven-thirty, they walked home. It was a warm May night with the softest stirring of air, and it was pleasant and exciting walking along the streets together, and she was glad when he took her hand and held it as they walked.

  They reached her house about midnight, and sat down together on the edge of the high porch with their feet on the steps below them, and it was different at that time in the ugly neighborhood from what it had ever been or would ever be again, an illusion in the light of stars and moon of grace and quietude. He told her awkwardly that he loved her and asked her if she loved him in return, and she said that she did for his sake and the illusion’s, although she knew with a strange and aching sadness that it was not true, that she was really in love with half an hour of a May night and with herself in that fragment of time. In response to her lie, he put his arms around her and kissed her, and she found it agreeable. When he did it again, she responded by putting her arms around him also, and felt one small breast cupped gently in a hand, and heard behind them in that instant the explosive opening of the screen door.