Флетчер Флора - Wake Up With a Stranger

He went to his room, all right, but he did not wait. He would rather have faced the devil himself than the man who had sired him. He left the college and caught a bus to St. Louis, and he never saw his father again until after the man was dead, at which time he went home to attend the funeral and collect five hundred dollars that had been left him in a final spirit of paternal charity. He worked at various jobs and was not very successful at any of them, and while he still had most of the five hundred dollars left, he married a very pretty young woman named Ellen Fischer. He married her and unconsciously hated her because she excited him sexually, thereby degrading him, and when they had a child about two years later, he unconsciously hated her also, because she would in her turn excite and degrade someone else.

Inasmuch as she was an attractive girl, she excited a good many boys, but it would be impossible to identify them. However, it would be possible to identify definitely the several who, on the other hand, excited her, and the first of these was a boy named Enos Simon.

She met him when she was a senior in high school, and she had by that time decided what she wanted to do and what kind of person she wanted to be. She had enrolled in a correspondence course in design, which she studied in addition to her regular school assignments, and she had definitely abandoned any idea of going to college. She would have liked to go, so far as that was concerned, but only if she could do it in a manner that suited her, which was out of the question for financial reasons. So she enrolled in the correspondence course as an alternative, and she worked very hard at it, and at the same time she began deliberately to try to achieve a certain effect physically. She designed and made her clothing for the achievement of this, and she also became artful in the use of cosmetics. It was in this period, just before she met Enos Simon, that she went to the optometrist and bought the harlequin glasses.

She met Enos in the reading room of a branch library about a mile from her home. The task of carrying the correspondence course and doing well at the same time in her school work was proving rather strenuous, and she had acquired the habit of going directly from school to the library in order to accomplish as much as possible before going home. The day she first saw Enos there, she was sitting as usual at a large table at which as many as six people could be seated, and he moved slowly across in front of her, beyond the table along a tier of shelves against a wall. He seemed to be reading titles in a rather desultory way, not stopping to remove and open any of the books, and what struck her at very first sight was an air of somber intensity about him. His skin was swarthy, his hair was dark and tumbled and slightly curly, and although he was clean he was somewhat unkempt, as if he had a fine indifference to the effect of his clothes, which had in its own way its own effect. He carried his head tilted a little forward, his chin tucked down, and this gave him the appearance of looking up at an angle under his heavy brows with a kind of repelling expression, not so much of belligerence as of a fierce desire to be let alone. He drifted along the tier of shelves and out of sight without stopping or looking once in Donna’s direction, but she thought of him that night and looked for him when she returned the next afternoon.

He was there, sitting alone at the very same table she had sat at yesterday, and she was shaken by the strong feeling she had upon seeing him. It was as if his presence were something she had planned, and it amounted, therefore, to a conquest.

He was slouched in his chair with his legs extended under the table, and when she sat down across from him, she accidentally kicked one of his feet. He drew the foot away and looked up at her from his book with that oddly fierce expression she had noticed before.

“Excuse me,” she said.

He grunted and lowered his eyes, but she continued to stare across at him as she opened the chemistry text she intended to study, and after a while he looked up again to meet her gaze.

“I wish you wouldn’t stare at me,” he said.

“Why? Do you feel guilty?”

“Guilty? Why the devil should I feel guilty?”

“Because you have such bad manners.”

“What do you know about my manners? You know nothing about them at all.”

“I know that you stick your legs out in all directions, which is rude, and I know that you haven’t even the courtesy to acknowledge an apology.”

“All right. Now you have told me off, and you can quit staring at me.”

“I am just wondering why you never comb your hair.”

“So now we are being rude to each other! It’s a pleasure to tell you that my hair, and what I do or don’t do to it, is none of your damn business.”

“Perhaps not. But it’s rather fascinating just the same. Rather like Raggedy Andy’s. Like a string mop. I’m also wondering why you let your clothes get to looking as if you slept in them. Is it a kind of pose or something?”

“Suppose it is. You’re something of a poseur yourself, aren’t you? Why do you wear glasses shaped like that, for instance, and why do you fix your face and your hair to make you look like a college girl at least, when you’re obviously only in high school?”

“Do my looks offend you?”

“Not at all. I don’t care what you try to look like.”

They had started talking in whispers, but their voices had risen in the exchange, and suddenly a female librarian appeared from around a tier of shelves and hissed at them sharply. The boy turned his head indolently in her direction and hissed back at her deliberately.

“Old crow,” he said.

The librarian flushed and wagged an admonishing finger and retreated.

“My God,” Donna whispered, “there’s no end to your bad manners, is there?”

“I don’t like being hissed at,” he said.

“Well, neither do I, so we had better stop talking.”

“Must we? Now that you’ve started it, I’m not sure that I want to stop.”

“Don’t I have anything to say about it?”

“Oh, I suppose I’d eventually get tired and quit talking if you simply refused to listen or make any reply.”

“Yes, but before that happened, you might get thrown out of here.”

“That’s true. And you might get thrown out also, since you’re involved. Would you feel humiliated if you were?”

“I think I’d manage to survive.”

“I’m sure you would. But it seems silly to invite trouble. There are lots of places we could talk all we wanted to.”

“What places?”

“I don’t know. Lots of them.”

“Are you asking me to leave with you?”

“Not yet. I’ll ask you, though, if you promise to agree. I don’t like being rejected.”

“That’s two things you don’t like. Being hissed at and being rejected.”

“There are others. Many others. Do you agree to go?”

“Yes.”

“Then I ask you to leave with me.”

They closed their books and stood up and went out past the desk of the angry librarian, and outside they stood on the sidewalk that was wet from an earlier rain and wondered where they should go together in the soft mid-May afternoon that was almost evening.

“If we are going some place together,” she said, “we should at least know each other’s name. Mine’s Donna Buchanan.”

“Mine’s Enos Simon. Where would you like to go?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you just choose one of the lots of places you know about?”

“Do you like beer?”

“I’ve never drunk any.”

“I knew that look of yours was phony.”

“What look?”

“You try to make people think you’re a lot more experienced than you really are.”