Occasion for Loving Read Online Free PDF Page A

varnish, dried gourds and cigarettes, coming from the Davises’ room.
    Jessie rustled quietly back to bed, by feel. She was asleep again almost at once, but just before she joined the others, she experienced—exactly like the silent flash of sheet-lightning that lifts the dark—another wakening in another night. She stood behind her bedroom door at home on Helgasdrift Mine and listened, above the pounding stroke of her heart, to small clinking noises in the bathroom. The gathering beat of her heart had woken her like a fist beating at her consciousness; she knew, before she was awake, why she was at that door. A tap turned on and off—the hot tap, that squeaked. More slight clinks, as of things picked up and put down. Silence. Then the sound of the bathroom door opening, the tsk! of the light turned off. She opened the bedroom door and confrontedher mother. She put out her hand and turned on the passage light so that her mother should be spared nothing. There the woman was, the grease of the cream she put on her face before she went to bed shining like sweat, the celanese nightgown showing her drooping, middle-aged breasts, the triangular shadow of her sex.
    â€œWhat’s the matter?” the girl rasped out.
    The woman was caught; light found out her face in a moment of private disgust, weariness, the secret shame of unwanted lust. “Go to bed; go on.”
    They stood staring at each other, afraid of each other. The girl was not a child, but nineteen years old; her body could have been risen from the act of love. But she knew it only in books; she knew it only through the distaste her mother expressed for men; the things her mother did not say; the grouping of her mother and herself as opposed to the exclusion of her stepfather. The girl’s feelings were violent: was she trembling with pity and shame, for the outrage of her mother? There was a struggling animus, horrible, in her—did she want, as well, to shame her mother, to expose her, to force her to admit that she was outraged?
    â€œWhat’s wrong? Are you ill? I heard you in the bathroom.” She would not let her off.
    â€œNothing. Go to bed.” The woman’s voice was hysterical, stern, almost on the point of foolishness, with embarrassment.
    â€œBut why were you in the bathroom so long?” the girl said cruelly, pitiful. She had caught her. She had shamed her. She had forced the unspoken into tangible existence.
    â€œ
Nothing
. Go back to bed.” Her mother gave in and appealed to her nakedly, as a woman.
    Bruno Fuecht. He had no name. A creature lying on the other side of a door, in bed as in a lair. Love. Her mother, Bruno Fuecht, and—. A conclusion reached only once, in the middleof the night. Left unfinished, for ever, in her daytime self. Love. Mrs. Fuecht is so close to her daughter. “My daughter is my life.”
    At last, she slept beside Tom Stilwell.
    The next day there was a letter for Jessie from Mrs. Fuecht. Jessie ladled out macaroni cheese at lunch, and opened her post in between times. “That’s odd—I dreamt about them last night,” she said, picking up her mother’s letter. But it was not true that she had dreamt. She shook her head as she read: “The old man’s in a nursing home again. What a queer woman she is; she writes with a real air of triumph about it.” “Relieved to have him off her hands, I suppose,” said Tom; the Fuechts had retired to the coast just after he married Jessie: he had not met old Fuecht more than three times in his life, though Mrs. Fuecht had come up for a few awkward days each time a child had been born. He was satisfied that they had no part of Jessie, and he merely concurred with her token interest in them. Since Fuecht had got old, he had become ill, eccentric and difficult. “He’s been giving her a hell of a time. She says he threw his diet food out of the window and then got dressed and slipped out of