Флетчер Флора - Wake Up With a Stranger

She did not want to go. She would have much preferred going to her own apartment, but it was necessary now to go home instead, not only because she felt committed to her mother for a part of each Sunday, but also because she needed her parents’ help. She wanted them to be prepared to swear she had been home last night in case it was necessary or desirable for some reason she could not foresee.

She always thought of it as home, though it had never been that to her in any significant sense of the word; she had hated it while she was there, and had left it with relief. She dreaded going back even for a visit to the ugly, narrow two-story house cramped darkly between houses as high and ugly and narrow on either side.

She dreaded also seeing her mother and father. For her mother, she felt pity and some respect and a nagging sense of responsibility. For her father, a querulous ineffectual person who persisted ridiculously in trying to exercise the prerogatives of his position, without ever having assumed adequately the obligations, she felt contempt only. She wished she had never known him, would have liked never to see him again, and would surely never have gone near him or permitted him to come near her if it had not been for her mother.

When she was given a place in Aaron’s shop, she began to plan immediately to move into an apartment, and she executed the plan a few days after the night Aaron took her in the back room. She still contributed money, however, to supplement her father’s irregular income, always handing it directly to her mother, for whom she intended it and without whom she would not have given it. She visited the narrow, ugly house almost every Sunday, again for the sake of her mother only. Now she had to leave the shop and visit it again, this time, though, for her own sake too. It would be well, she thought, to go at once.

She did not call a taxi by telephone. She went through the shop to the front door and pulled the blind away from the glass a few inches and stood peering up the street until a taxi came into view. Then she went out quickly to the curb and stopped it and got in.

She began to wonder what would be the best way to get from her mother and father the consent to the lie that might never become necessary at all, but she could formulate no particular strategy, and probably would need none, for her mother was weak and her father was vulnerable. In the end they would simply do as she told them to. The taxi moved slowly through cloudy streets, and for a long while she sat erect in the back seat, looking through the taxi window at the changing character of the city as the buildings diminished and admitted the sky and became residential in allotments of blanketed lawn between shopping-center breaks. Then, when they moved at last into the mean streets of her earliest remembrance, she leaned back and closed her eyes and quit looking at anything at all except the tenacious image — of Aaron dead — behind her lids.

The taxi stopped in front of the narrow and ugly house. She opened her eyes, got out and overpaid the driver, and then went quickly up the stairs and across the high porch and into a dark hall. She paused in the hall to hang her coat on a rack fastened to the wall, and wondered with mounting depression why the smell never changed, never, never changed — the thin perennial and faintly sour smell which apparently had nothing to do with ventilation, or the lack of it, and was perhaps the breath of the house itself or the scent of sour lives. She turned away from the rack and started across to the entrance to the living room, and the voice of her mother came out to meet her. “Is that you, Donna?”

She answered that it was and went on into the room. Her mother was sitting in an overstuffed chair around which were scattered the several sections of a Sunday newspaper. She had been on the point of rising, but now she sank back and folded her hands in her lap and automatically tilted her head and turned her cheek for the swift kiss routinely accorded by this sleek and sometimes disturbing young woman who was (rather incredibly, she often thought) her daughter.

“Did you have trouble getting here?” she said.

“Because of the snow? No. None at all.”

“I was worried. I thought you might have trouble, or might not be able to come at all.”

“Well, I didn’t, but I imagine it would be wise if I started back early.”

“That’s too bad. I see you so seldom.”

“Once a week isn’t so seldom, Mother.”

“I wish you would live at home. It isn’t right for a girl to be living alone in an apartment when she has a home to live in.”

“Now, Mother, for Christ’s sake, let’s not start that all over again the moment I get here.”

“I just can’t help thinking I must have failed you some way. Why would a girl want to leave her home if she was happy in it?”

“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?”