Dear Rhea,
Thank you so much for your interest in my work. I am sending a bio and the first chapter of Sleeping With Strangers. It is longer than the others. I would love to have you print this wherever you deem appropriate.
I am grateful for this opportunity to be part of the Franco-American Institute!

Sincerely,
Ann Marie Samson
Willitis, CA



Sleeping With Strangers, an excerpt
by Ann Marie Samson


CHAPTER ONE
Somebody Must Pay

Deliverance was the best I could hope for, but deliverance was unavailable. So there I was, Cecile Belanger, a young woman coming home after having been away for two years, walking up the street into difficulty but with my head held high.
Carrying my one suitcase, I trudged from the train station through the streets of South Salem. The streets were surprisingly quiet without the hubbub of cars and children, the trees windless and still, as I rounded the corner to the old three-story house where I’d lived for sixteen years.

There was my old tabby cat, Hank, scurrying cross the front yard.
“At least a cat knows where to go to avoid trouble,” I said as I watched him slither under the lattice work that skirted the front porch.
I mounted the steps and placed a hand on the door knob, hesitating a moment before entering.
There it all was: the hallway with the umbrella stand, the broom closet, the floral wall paper maman and I put up ten years ago. I walked through the parlor and then into the kitchen. The usual bustle and hum of my mother’s sewing machine, kettles on the stove at a boil, sounds from the basement of my father’s shrieking saws – all were replaced with an inauspicious silence. Then I heard my father’s voice.
“You stupid, stupid girl!” his voice shouted down to me from the hallway upstairs. I froze at the foot of the stairs.
“Don’t come up here,” he hollered down.
Then from the from behind him came my mother’s voice.
“Tell her to stay away. Tell her I don’t want to hear anything about it right now. Tu sais, I don’t have the strength.”
“Now see what you’ve done?” My father thumped down the stairs, his hand waving back and forth, a battle-ready banner.
I began backing away, the suitcase still in my hand.
“But she told me to come home,” I pleaded, standing aside with my back against the wall.
He raced down the last steps and smacked me hard on the side of the head, knocking off my hat which sailed over the banister. He grabbed my arm.
“Just look at her!” He pointed behind him to the top of the stairs where my mother was standing.
“Tell Cecile I’ve begun a novena,” she called down.
“You’ve made your mother sick. Sick to death,” He began shaking me with both his hands on my shoulders. “Crying nonstop since she heard from your aunt.”
My mother began sobbing.
“See? Only here a few minutes and you bring nothing but trouble.” He held me hard by the shoulder and with his other hand he slapped my face. Despite myself, I let out a sudden sharp cry, but he kept slapping at me with his open hand.
“TA!” Stop it! Stop killing her!” my mother yelled. I twisted away from him and dashed up the stairs, crying.

Then I just stopped for a moment, not knowing whether to go to my mother or go to my room or leave the house all together. My mother signaled with her hand that I should go to my room at the end of the hall. She slipped back into their bedroom and closed the door.
I looked back down the stairs at my father. Having spent himself he slumped down, sitting on one of the stairs saying bitch and whore and bitch again, staring up at the ceiling where none of this was happening.
Then he said, “Who is going to pay for this, huh? I want to know. Somebody must pay.”
So now I knew what it was they wanted. Somebody to pay for their misery.

At last I was in my familiar bed tucked into the dormer of my room, burrowing under the afghan I made years ago. Here I could hide in the darkness of my own thoughts. I tried to just sit quietly but my body was so loud, singing out trouble all over the place.
They would want an explanation. I must tell them something and it had to be something believable. Or at least something they would believe; not the real story the way it happened. They would want something made up like a movie. A love story. Otherwise they would think I was a whore. Nothing I’d ever read or heard or even imagined before in my life had prepared me for the telling of such a story.
What could I say to a mother who worried herself sick over nothing; a mother who, when she found out, (years ago, this was}, I had been kissed by a boy - something so innocent you could collapse laughing about it. Just Billy Dolan, a neighbor boy sneaking up on me unawares behind the movie theater and I’d almost fallen into the garbage can trying to get away so fast.
Now there was this. So much worse, with all kinds of terrible implications about me and what I’d done. But I would have to tell them something, of course.
In the last few days I’d come up with several stories which I could tell any which way. I knew enough not to get carried away, not say something inconceivable – not a story about dancing all night at the Coconut Grove and getting drunk and going up to someone’s hotel room afterwards. No. Not me. Not Cecile. Not Cecile who always listened and sat quietly, the one who never missed a Sunday communion, the one nobody ever worried about,
The man – he could be anything; a handsome non-Jewish doctor, a hardworking bread delivery man, the guy who mowed the golf course across the street, a union plumber, a tramp, a juggler, an Indian chief – anything. All he had to be was dead. Dead so he was unavailable.
Dead in Flanders under the poppies. No. Wrong war. Shot down on the Pacific front, crashed in his plane, just like everybody’s been reading about in the papers the last few years.
Yes. A story out of the newspapers. Something they’d believe. It could be anything I made up. Anything but the truth.

For the rest of the day my mother stayed in her room and spoke to no one. I left a tray of food at her door. But she must have heard me on the stairs. She called me into the bedroom.
“Close the door,” she whispered.
She was sitting up against the pillows, wearing the face of one who’d been run through with a bayonet.
“You look like something the cat dragged in,”’ she said before I even finished shutting the door. I went to her bedside and stood there, waiting. She immediately started in.
“I suppose you’ll be telling everyone none of this was your fault. I suppose you’ll say we sent you away when you were too young and it is your mother’s fault, my fault, all of it. As if I never told you anything. As if I didn’t warn you. As if I didn’t say hundreds of times it’s all the same whether you are a young woman, a sheep in the field, or a cow in the barn. It is all the same to them. These men.”
“No, maman. I’m not saying that. I’m haven’t been telling anyone anything, believe me.”
I kept studying the row of perfume and cologne bottles on the bureau, all of them unused. They’d been there for years it seemed and now I could not stop looking at them.
“Come here.” My mother took my hand and pulled me in closer. “You are killing me, you know that?” She put my hand on her heart. “Right there. Feel how it is thumping.” She held my hand there against her chest. “Do you know what it feels like?” She paused to take in her breath. “It’s like you stabbed me right in here.”
She kept my hand there against her chest. “I suppose you’re telling yourself “Maman will fix it. God will fix it. Notre dame in ciel will fix it. But nobody fixes it.”
“Yes, I know, maman.”
“You know nothing. You have no idea what you’re in for.” She threw her head back against pillows in exasperation and all I could think about was some cool hole in the earth where I could curl up and the ground would close in all around me.
I had to tell her before my father came into the room.
I knew what she expected, so without props or scenery or stage effects, I began to summon up the story I’d already been composing for days in my head. “There was a sailor on leave that came into Tante Adele’s hat shop. It was Saturday afternoon. I was working the counter when he . . .(he was a navy man) came into the shop.”
I knew the next part had to be something my parents would find believable. Allowing myself to be seduced by a sailor on leave was sinful, but not at all out of the ordinary. There were plenty of sailors and plenty of young girls ready to fall for them. So I went on with it.
“He was on leave, looking for a hat for his aunt,” he said.”
“And where was your aunt Adele?” Maman asked.
“In the basement of the house. Washing the altar cloths for the nuns.”
I ignored her loud harrumph and went on. “I tried to be helpful of course. I showed him the best hats. He asked me to put on a few for his benefit. To see how they looked.” Then later, an hour after he left he called the store and asked to speak to me. He wanted to see me again. I agreed. The next day he was back.
Then I described for her (quickly) how we walked in the front yard edged with lilac bushes, and he kissed me on the swing.
I did not describe the kiss. I just said that weekend he came back again. I saw him waiting outside in a car, waiting for me to get off work. We went off together in his car, a grey Ford to be exact, with a rumble seat in back. He told me he would be leaving for California to board his ship.
“You went away with him in his car?” My mother blanched and threw her head back against the pillows.
Now the story was harder to tell, but I had gone this far and I knew I could push along to the end.
“He took me to the fairgrounds. We walked the midway, and then it was time for him to leave. He asked me to kiss him. We. . . we went parking in the cemetery. That’s where it happened.”
“In a cemetery?” My mother put her hand to her forehead in amazement. “Mot de Dieu!” Is this true?
“Yes. But it was only that one time”, I quickly added. “He was going away the next day. We knew we loved one another deeply.” (I was hesitant to use that word but it seemed perfect.) He promised to buy me a diamond ring when he got to California, but he never did because . . . the way things turned out his ship was called to Japan.” I managed true tears at this point because I could honestly weep as I spoke out loud the way I wished things had happened. “He was on the USS Indianapolis. It sank, remember? The Japanese submarines attacked it. He was one of the ones never found.”
There. I’d done it. Period. The end.
“His name?” my mother asked.
“Russell Dunlop.” I had that at the ready.
“Where is his family?”
“He has no family. There’s no one. “His aunt raised him, but she’s dead. He was just visiting Worcester on leave.”
“If she was dead why was he buying her a hat?” My mother looked at me if I had a cauliflower for a brain. Still I went on. “No. He just made that up. You see, when he saw me in the window he came in to see me. He said I looked like such an interesting woman so involved in arranging all those hats.”
My mother clucked her tongue in disgust. Now it was a lottery whether she and my father would ever believe me or not. Certainly the story would have been better if he’d been shot down on the battlefield, killed in action, the body sent home for a military burial and a purple heart, like Billy Dolan. But it was too late for that, V.J. day having already occurred a month ago.
Still I had told a story. Now I was the one who would have to pay for the lies.

My mother took to her bed. A doctor was called, the priest summoned. The doctor stayed for an hour, speaking to her in hushed tones with the bedroom door shut, and then he left a bottle of tiny white pills for her “nerves.”
The priest was the pastor himself, Pere Rouliere. He arrived at the door with his breviary and a holy relic wrapped in a handkerchief. My father led him to the bedroom.
I watched from the doorway as the priest touched my mother’s forehead with the relic and sprinkled holy water on the sheets. The priest and my father crossed themselves, a thumb touching forehead, heart, and each shoulder. Minutes later the three of us - the priest, my father and I - descended the stairs to the parlor where the priest took a seat on the couch and summoned me to sit in an empty chair my father had placed beside him. Then my father left the room.
“Your parents do not believe you. They think you are withholding the truth. It’s not good for you to persist in these ways, Cecile.” The pastor was trembling because of the palsy he had in his hands, and the umbrella he still held between his knees rattled against the floor before he went on.
“Your mother only wants what’s best for you. She feels you must ask for her assistance in these matters. You should respect these wishes which from your mother are given to you like the commandments themselves. Honor your father and mother, God has told us. This I am sure you already know.”
I nodded my head politely.
“There is something else you should know.”
I sat very still with my hands folded in my lap and waited while he cleared his throat several times.
“Your family has limited resources. There will be expenses involved here. Somebody must take responsibility. In this case the young man is . . . you say he was lost in the war?”
 Why couldn’t they understand? In this harsh world we try to do our best. What could I do at this point but nod my head. “Then you must allow your parents to help you. It is the way these things are done.” His breath when he leaned toward me. . .I just had to turn away my head.
“Cecile, are you listening to me?”
I said yes, father, and he went on. “Yes, there is help available to you. But such places, even those run by the church, cost money. And later, there will be the child to think of.” (More coughing) “So? What will you do?” He touched me lightly on my arm with his cane. “We must know if there is any chance of marriage for you. Anything that you have not mentioned perhaps. We must think of what God would want.”
I took a handkerchief out of my blouse pocket and covered my face before blowing my nose.
If God wanted anything it was not what everyone was telling me. If God wanted anything it was that this child should have its own mother to love it, or else He would have taken it away from me earlier on when I was more desperate and had wanted Him to. And no priest, carrying bits of dead saints, was going to help me any either.
Outside the window ordinary things were happening, I could see that. Clothes flapped on the line. A milk truck rounded the corner. A man and a woman leaned against the stone wall. The man held the woman's packages while she adjusted her stockings. A newsboy rode by on his bicycle. None of them had any idea what was going on in this room.
"I have decided to keep the baby," I said. But it was as if another person spoke and I was only listening.

The priest had me call my mother and father to join us in the parlor. My father sat down in his easy chair and my mother sat on the couch beside the priest. For a while they were all staring at me as if I were something in a museum, sitting in a glass case. My mother rung her fingers around and around a handkerchief and wept about how willful I was and here they were in this grievous situation and not getting any cooperation at all. “
“When she was younger we could have tried ice baths to calm her down, but here she is eighteen and big for her age, too big for such methods.”
Father Levesque nodded his head back and forth and studied the carpet. "Now that you have had some time to think, is there any change in your heart?” he asked me.
There was the scuffling of feet under chairs everyone adjusted themselves to listen. I just sat there quietly, docile as trash.
"Answer the pastor, Cecile,” maman said. “He is talking to you.” Then she turned toward the pastor. “See what have I been telling you, father? Like a mule she is. It’s a crying shame. Si mauvais!”
 “Your mother is speaking to you, Cecile,” the priest said. “You must answer. You must tell us something - what you’ll do. What your plan is. Something. You must tell us something.”
"Exactly!" My mother slapped the couch with her hand.
“I’ve told you already,” I said. I looked at each of them. “I am keeping the baby myself.”
My mother sat up. Her neck came right up out of her cardigan. "You see? She has no sense. She’s not all right in her head. Keep the baby? A child raising a child. And where? In this house?” She turned to me. “And, Cecile, what do you think the neighbors would say?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll move away.”
“And who will support you?” my father asked.
What could I say? I swallowed hard and went on. “I‘ll work it out somehow.”
The pastor furrowed his brow. “And that is all you have to tell us on the matter?”
“Yes. That‘s all.”
My mother began weeping heavily into her handkerchief; the pastor leaned forward in his chair to talk to me. He spoke in the voice he used in the pulpit. I must put my mother's heart at ease, I must pray to St. Cecile, my patron saint, for guidance. “You must let go of pride, my child,” he said, “and tell your family who the father of your baby is so we can all come to some sort of agreement.”
Then he asked me if I would like him to hear my confession. I said no.
“Mon Dieu!” my mother exclaimed.
If only they would leave me alone instead of staring at me like that, my mother with her dying-in–my-chair-look, my father glowering at me as if I were no better than bath scum. Inside, I knew I was not sinful. “I am a good person,” Did I say that aloud? Still something terrible had happened. I had broken some kind of continuity. Now the world for my family would never be the same.

Samson/Bio

I was born with writer’s brain and have been afflicted ever since. In my ordinary life I’m a wife, mother, grand mother, auntie and friend. I am also a struggling but aspiring flamenco dancer. Because of my obsession with words I try not to drive and write stories at the same time. Sometimes it’s a struggle.

I’ve taught creative writing to people of all ages and I had the good fortune of working for many years with California Poets in the Schools. I also taught at the local college and blabbed some on the radio. My short fiction has appeared in Zyzzyva, Inkwell, Gemini and other literary magazines.