Wake Up With a Stranger

by Flora, Fletcher

Her father was in the living room. He did not rise from his chair when she entered, and apparently, since there was neither a book nor a newspaper in his hands or near him, he had simply been sitting alone and doing nothing. She was thankful that he remained still and made no effort to greet her physically, for she could not bear to have him touch her. His gray, curly hair was uncombed, and his face below it, still rather handsome in a heavy, florid fashion, had a kind of blurred look, the features somehow indistinct, as if he had been drinking heavily. She knew, however, that he had not, for he never drank at all. Neither did he smoke or gamble or engage in infidelity. His only vices were failure and petulance and sometimes petty sadism. Looking at him, she wished that she might never have to look at him again, but she was determined to be amicable.

  “Well,” he said, “so you have finally condescended to come and see us.”

  “I have come to see Mother,” she said, violating her amity at once with the pointed exclusion. “Is she here?”

  “She’s upstairs in bed.”

  “Taking a nap?”

  “I don’t know if she’s asleep or not. She’s sick.”

  “Sick? What’s the matter with her?”

  “I don’t know. We haven’t had a doctor.”

  “Has she been sick long?”

  “Why should you be so concerned? If you came to see her a little more often, or if you lived at home as a decent daughter should, you would not have to ask such questions. What if she had died any time in the past three weeks? Would you want to know how long she had been dead?”

  She turned away from him and started toward the door, but when she reached it, she stopped and turned and looked at him with loathing.

  “I’ll tell you something,” she said, “which you know is perfectly true, though you would never admit it. I came here determined to be amicable, but I see that it is impossible, and so I will tell you what we both know. You have done a great deal for Mother, and I have done very little, this is true. But the little I have done has been for good, and the great deal that you have done has been for bad, all for bad. It would have been better if you had gone away and left her long ago.”

  With an intensification of her loathing, she watched a dull and ugly flush rise slowly into his face. Before he could speak, she went on out into the hall and upstairs to her mother’s room. The room was closed tightly and did not look clean. The air was still and sour. On the bed, her mother lay breathing with a harsh, throaty sound, almost as if she were fighting strangulation, and every few seconds the strangled sound of breathing was punctuated by a moan. Crossing to the bed, Donna looked down at the sick woman and saw immediately that she was certainly burning with a high fever. That her illness was serious, if not critical, was obvious. “Mother,” Donna said.

  She laid a hand on her mother’s forehead and repeated the word, and her mother’s eyes opened slowly and focused slowly.

  “Donna,” she said.

  She was almost unable to say it at all. The name was hardly more than the shape of the sound with her lips. She lifted a hand above the covers, and Donna caught it as it was falling.

  “I’m sick,” she said. “I’m so very sick.”

  Donna had to lean far down in order to hear the words. Besides being faint, they were distorted by pain.

  “How do you feel?” Donna said. “In what way do you feel sick?”

  “I am cold and hot by turns, and I am sick to my stomach. And my legs and back hurt. I can’t understand why my legs and back hurt me so much.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I didn’t want to bother you. I was sure I would begin to feel better soon.”

  “You should have called me. Surely you know that I want you to call me when you need me. Certainly, at any rate, you should have called a doctor.”

  “Doctors are expensive. I thought I would get better without it.”

  “Why didn’t Father call one? Damn it to hell, doesn’t he have any judgment whatever?”

  “You mustn’t blame your father, dear. Things are so difficult for him just now.”

  “Oh, hell! Things are always so difficult for Father. Well, never mind. I’m sorry. You lie still, now, and I’ll go call a doctor at once. Would you like the window opened a little before I go? The air is so stale in here.”

  “If you think so, dear. Only a little, though. I have such chills.”

  Donna released her mother’s hand and crossed to a window, which she lowered about a foot from the top, and then went out and downstairs to the telephone in the hall. She looked up the number of a doctor who had been called to the house before and dialed it with a kind of restrained violence. She was furious with her father for not having called earlier, and the fury was at the same time a useful defense against the guilt she felt herself for having stayed away so long. The doctor agreed to come, and she hung up the telephone and turned to face her father, who had come out of the living room.

  “What have you done?” he said.

  “I have done what you should have done yourself,” she said. “I have called a doctor.”

  “We don’t need you to run our affairs. Your interference is not wanted.”

  “You would let Mother die without attention, but I will not. I have called a doctor, whose bill I will pay, if that concerns you, and you can go to hell.”

  “I will not allow you to talk to me like this in my own home. You are not welcome here any longer. Get out of here and don’t come back.”

  “I’ll leave your Goddamn house, all right, if that’s what you want, but I’ll not leave until I’ve seen the doctor. In the meanwhile, you stay the hell away from me and leave me strictly alone. Do you hear?”

  She was certain for a moment that he was going to strike her, something he had not done since that night on the porch when she was fifteen years old, but then he turned abruptly and went back into the living room. She stood and listened while he crossed to his chair and dropped heavily into it, after which she ascended the stairs and entered her mother’s room, stopping by the door and staring across at the figure on the bed, which did not move. The sick woman had not gone to sleep, but at least she had become quiet, and it would surely be better not to disturb her until the doctor came. In the meanwhile, it would be quite impossible merely to stand and wait in the shabby, sour room. What was needed was a cigarette, which would be in a measure sustaining and would make time endurable, but it might not be wise to add smoke to the already fetid air in which a sick woman already breathed with a strangled sound.

  Stepping back into the hall, leaving the door slightly open behind her, Donna lit the needed cigarette and drew smoke deeply into her lungs. She wondered how long the doctor would be in coming. She hoped that he would not be long, for the last thing she wanted was to stand here waiting and waiting, with guilt and loathing in her heart for herself and her father, and the old ambivalence of contempt and love for her mother, who was very ill and possibly even dying. Perhaps it would be best, after all, if she did die, and perhaps her mother herself thought it would be best and wanted it and for that reason had not called the doctor or expressed any need for one. She had wasted everything — everything was gone and nothing at all of any value was left to waste — and perhaps she simply recognized and accepted that it was time to die.

  Leaning against the wall, staring across at the ugly, faded pattern of roses on the wall opposite, she began to remember — in no particular order, without relationship to the chronology of their occurrence — some of the things she had seen and done and been a part of in this house. The sewing machine singing in the room where women came and stood for fittings. The small girl working the treadle with her hands, sometimes in a colored tent of silk or wool or brightly printed cotton. Mrs. Kullen in her corset in a slant of sun, an oddment with downy thighs. Wayne Buchanan saying grace to God and hating God’s world for reasons of his own. A dozen scattered fragments of a part of life renounced and outgrown but still in remembrance an oppression and a threat.

&
nbsp; Why does that bastard Tyler wait so long? she thought. Why in God’s name doesn’t he simply tell me whether he will or will not let me have the money?

  Downstairs, the front door bell rang and stopped ringing and rang again. Moving to the head of the stairs, she looked down into the hall and watched her father come out of the living room and admit the doctor, a short, plump man carrying the black leather bag that was as much the sign of his profession as the caduceus. After an exchange of words, the doctor came up the stairs alone. He had a round face with sharp little eyes in puffs of darkened flesh. As he rose to her level on the stairs, he looked at Donna, and away, and changed the bag from one hand to the other. He gave the impression of being uncertain as to why he had been called, and what might be expected of him now that he had come.

  “This way, doctor,” Donna said.

  She preceded him to the door of her mother’s room and opened it and stood aside for him to enter. She did not follow him inside, but remained waiting in the hall, and after a while lit and smoked another cigarette. When the cigarette had burned to a stub, she lit still another from it. The last cigarette was also a stub when the doctor came out into the hall at last. He blinked and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and index finger and shook his head in a way that she interpreted to indicate solemnity.

  “She’s sick,” he said. “Very sick.”

  “What’s the matter with her?”

  “Well, it’s risky to say on the basis of a cursory examination, but the symptoms seem quite definite. Chills and fever, pain in the legs and back. Nausea. Frequent and painful urination. I would say, as a tentative diagnosis at least, that pyelitis is strongly indicated.”

  “Pyelitis? What’s that?”

  “A kidney infection.”

  “Should she be in a hospital?”

  “Yes. It would be better. I recommend that she be taken immediately.”

  “Will you make the arrangements?”

  “Yes, yes. I’ll call and have an ambulance sent. In the meanwhile, perhaps you could pack a few essentials and prepare her to go.”

  “All right. I’ll get her ready while you’re calling.”

  The doctor went down the hall and downstairs to the telephone, and Donna went into her mother’s room. She found a small bag in the closet and put into it the articles of clothing and toilet that she thought her mother would need in the hospital. When she had finished doing this, she went over to the bed and looked down at her mother’s face.

  “You are going to the hospital, Mother,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “You will feel better when you are there. They will make you well soon.”

  The sick woman’s eyes closed and remained closed for perhaps thirty seconds and then opened again.

  “I will not get well,” she said, “but it doesn’t matter. I only want to be comfortable, so that I can die peacefully.”

  “You mustn’t say things like that, Mother,” Donna said. “We are sending you to get well, and that’s what you must do.”

  But she did not, of course. She died as she had said, and as she wished.

  In her apartment, about three o’clock in the morning, Donna received the news from the hospital.

  2.

  It was a dull, wet day. In the night it had rained, and it had rained also early in the morning. Then it had not rained again, though it had threatened constantly to resume, and the sky was a dirty smear. The wind was northwesterly, still cold. Beside the dark hole that had been opened in the earth, the mound of dirt had been covered with white canvas, but at the edges it spilled out thinly, like a brown stain, on grass that was beginning to show the merest sign of green. In a bush of bridal wreath beside a grave, a scarlet bird of some kind sat and cocked its head.

  The minister went through the ritual of consignment. His voice was high, nasal, threaded with a thin sound of petulance, as if he were scolding Death as a trespasser, but the petulance was surely only part of the quality of his voice. It was all depressing, and all unnecessary. Everything was finished, everything had been done and said, and all this — the words and gestures and symbolism — was no more than an ugly superfluity that were better omitted. Since it had not been omitted, however, it would at least be only decent, Donna thought, to complete it quickly and without excessive pretension. Life had been rejected, it was as simple as that; and it was now ill-mannered of Life, to say the least, to cling tenaciously to one who had wanted to go, comfortably and peacefully, to hold her now in the dull gray threat of rain and subject her in the end to the last grim measure of prescribed ritual.

  Standing beside Donna, Wayne Buchanan began to sob. The sound of his sobbing was shallow and shocking, rattling in his throat like phlegm. All through the ceremony earlier, and during the slow ride to this depressing place, he had sat silent and decorous. She had thought that she would at least be spared a maudlin demonstration (which was more than she had hoped for to start with), but now it seemed that she was not even to be spared this and she must bear after all, in addition to everything else, this intolerable abasement.

  How disgusting! she thought. How absolutely obscene!

  She closed her eyes and bowed her head and waited, and after a while it was over. In the back seat of the black car in which they had come, she sat beside her father, who was now quiet, and returned to her father’s house. It was not really necessary for her to go there — she might have gone on to her own place or to the shop or wherever she chose — but she wanted to go for a particular reason. The reason was that she might walk through the house one last time without obligations or bonds or anything at all to keep her or claim her or bring her back again when she was gone. It would be, in its own way, her own ritual.

  In front of the house, she got out of the car and went inside and directly upstairs. She walked through the rooms slowly, staying in each one until she felt impelled to move on, trying in each, by making herself very quiet and receptive, to recover the quality it had possessed in the short-lived period of happiness when she was very young, wanting sincerely in the final moments of the final departure to remember these rooms as kindly as she possibly could. The sewing room she saved to the end. Mrs. Kullen was there when she arrived, and remained when she went. Caught in her corset, fixed in light, she survived all others and would never leave.

  In the hall below, Wayne Buchanan was standing at the door and looking out through the small glass pane to the street. He turned when she came up behind him. His face was livid and loose on its bones, and he was at that moment, though she didn’t know it, more afraid and alone than he had ever been.

  “Are you going?” he asked.

  “Yes, I’m going.”

  “Will you come back to see me when you can?”

  “No. I hope that I never see you again.”

  “But — but why?”

  “You are not my father and have never been. You are only the man who helped to beget me.”

  “How can you say such things?”

  “Since they are true, they are not difficult to say. Perhaps it is difficult to hear and accept, but that’s your problem.”

  “I have always tried to do my best for my family.”

  “Do you actually confess that you could have done no better? Anyhow, it does not matter, because it’s a damn lie, and you know it very well. You have been mean and petty and cruel, and you have never tried honestly to do a truly generous thing. I was sick of you long ago, and I am sick of you now, but I am willing to do you the courtesy of forgetting you entirely if you will do the same for me.” He stepped aside abruptly and opened the door.

  3.

  Because she wanted to restore at once the pattern of life which had been interrupted by her mother’s death, she went to the shop. She arrived just before closing time and went through the salon to her workroom. There, she threw herself into a chair and stretched her legs out long in front of her, arching her back, and feeling in calves and thighs the pleasant tension of muscles. She felt liberated, cut lo
ose, in a way exonerated. She did not have any idea of precisely what she had been exonerated of, but she was conscious, nevertheless, of the lifting of an obscure indictment. Corollary with the liberation was a sense of being caught in a quickening current, a conviction that something of significance was going to happen to her, and that the thing to happen would be good. Reacting physically to the spur of her thoughts, she felt in her flesh a kind of tingling resiliency, and she was impelled to laugh aloud.

  After a while, Gussie Ingram knocked and entered without waiting for a response. She slouched in a chair and lit one of her interminable cigarettes.

  “Well,” she said, “how did it go?”

  “Miserably. I’m immensely relieved that it’s over.”

  “I hope you don’t mind because I wasn’t there. I simply cannot endure a funeral.”

  “Of course not. It would have been completely unnecessary.”

  “What will your father do now?”

  “I don’t know. He’ll get along, I suppose.”

  “I was wondering if perhaps you’d move in with him, now that he’s alone.”

  “No. I wouldn’t even consider it. My father and I are not compatible.”

  “Oh? Well, neither were me and mine, so far as that goes. What in God’s name is it that makes fathers so frequently impossible?”

  “Maybe they aren’t. Maybe ours were exceptions. Anyhow, I am feeling too good at present to spoil it by talking of unpleasant things. Do you think it wrong of me to feel good under the circumstances?”

  “I have long ago abandoned judging what is wrong or not wrong, darling.”

  “Well, I was just sitting here feeling free and rather excited. Rather like I used to feel the last day of school when I was a child. As a matter of fact, I have a peculiar notion that something good is about to happen. Do you believe it is possible to have valid premonitions?”

  “Oh, God, darling, don’t ask me.”

  “Wasn’t it Huxley who defined metaphysics as the art of befuddling oneself methodically?”