Searching for Donna Reed

A Short Story - Part 1 of 4

Photo by Fran Jacquier on Unsplash

Note from K.C.: For the month of June, I offer you a short story in four parts. Part 1 is the longest at approximately eight minutes reading time. Parts 2-4 are five minutes or less each. I will publish one part a week starting on Monday, June 1st and then on each successive Monday through June 22nd.

Part 1

Colleen aimed the remote, punched the channel up button, and stared as the images flickered on the glowing tube across the room. Although she hadn’t checked a clock, she was sure it was time for the Donna Reed Show. An L.A. station ran the old late fifties-early sixties family shows in the afternoon. Colleen never bothered to note the station’s channel number, she just searched until the familiar, ageless black and white characters showed up.

The Donna Reed Show had become the high point of Colleen’s day and the focus of her life ever since she found out, two weeks earlier, that her ex-husband, Thomas Woodson, planned to remarry.

She had spent twelve years, most of her adult life, as Mrs. Thomas Woodson. Even these last few months after the divorce, she kept that identity. She opened her new checking account using the name Mrs. Thomas Woodson. Her credit cards and driver’s license still carried that name. When introduced, she referred to herself as Mrs. Thomas Woodson, just as she always had. How could she quit being who she was? She didn’t know how to be anything else.

Her marriage had been a rebirth. Thomas gave her a real name and with it an identity. She had come to him with nothing. Even her maiden name, Colleen Hadley, was a hand-me-down from the nun who discovered her abandoned at birth.

Now there was to be a new Mrs. Thomas Woodson. Where did that leave Colleen? She wasn’t Mrs. Thomas Woodson anymore, and she couldn’t be Colleen Hadley. That name belonged to someone else, a gentle young woman who had married Jesus, become a nun, and taken the name Sister Charity. Colleen was being orphaned again, left alone and nameless in the world.

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Colleen had just turned five years old when Sister Charity told her Jesus was calling the nun to join him in heaven, and she would soon be leaving.

“I want to go, too,” Colleen said. “I want to stay with you.” She clutched the heavy black cloth of the nun’s habit.

Sister Charity hugged her, then sat down and pulled Colleen up into her lap.

“A long time ago,” Sister Charity began and Colleen smiled. She loved stories, and Sister Charity always started her stories this way. “There was a kind and beautiful young mother who had a baby boy named Moses. She made a little boat for him out of reeds called bulrushes and grass and tar and slime, which is what we call mud. The boat was like a floating basket. She put baby Moses in it and hid it in some tall weeds called flags by the river bank so the evil king who wanted to kill all the boy babies would not find Moses.”

“Why did the king want to kill the boy babies?” Colleen asked, thankful that she was a girl, but curious nevertheless.

“Because the king was evil,” Sister Charity said. She gave Colleen that look with lips pressed together so tightly they almost disappeared and eyebrows arched that said not to interrupt again. Then she continued with the story.

“The basket floated near the river’s edge and rocked Moses so he didn’t cry. Soon a princess of the king came to the river to take a bath along with her handmaidens. The princess discovered baby Moses and loved him instantly. She took him to her palace and raised him as her own son. And the evil king never knew about it.

“When Moses grew up he became a great leader of his people, who were slaves in the king’s country.”

Sister Charity paused. Colleen waited for Sister Charity to give her a peck on the cheek and walk away to join the other nuns like she did at the end of every story. But the story wasn’t over, because Sister Charity started talking again.

“Colleen, your mother left you for me to find, because she was afraid something bad would happen to you if you stayed with her, in the same way Moses’ mother was afraid of the evil king. Now I must leave you, as well. But you must stay. You will do great things when you grow up, and God needs you to stay here.”

“Was the Princess who found Moses pretty?”

“Yes, she was very pretty and very kind.”

Colleen waited for Sister Charity to put her in the basket-boat and float her on the river. She had never been to a river, but she had seen pictures of rivers in books. The nuns took her to the lake for picnics. Colleen wondered if the river was like the lake.

Before Sister Charity could fashion a basket-boat, she died. A short time later, the convent closed, and Colleen became a ward of the state. A social worker assigned her to a foster home, where she waited impatiently for a beautiful princess to discover her.

The children of the foster parents made fun of Colleen when she insisted they take her to the river and put her in a basket so a princess could find her. They called Colleen a retard and a liar and told her that there were no princesses in the United States. Colleen countered with tantrums and refusal to eat or do her chores.

Soon she found herself in another foster home where one night on the television screen there appeared the most beautiful lady Colleen had ever seen, a lady beautiful enough to be a princess: Donna Reed.

Colleen inched closer to the screen to make it easier for Donna Reed to see her. The foster mother scolded her for getting too close to the television, but Colleen crawled nearer. She waved and whispered, “Over here. I’m over here. Look. Look. It’s me, Colleen.”

One of the foster children told her to shut up and get out of the way. Only when the foster mother threatened to send Colleen to bed before the program finished did she settle down. She didn’t dare miss a second. Who knew when Donna Reed might spot her and come to take her away?

Living her life in thirty-minute chunks once a week, Colleen absorbed the details of every Donna Reed Show and replayed the episodes over and over in her mind. She prayed for Donna Reed to come and take her to her home, to that perfect place Colleen now knew so well, where there was no loneliness, no cruelty, and no abandonment. The place where everyone was attractive and wore nice clothes, where the house was always clean and dinner was always on time, where Donna Reed smiled at her children. The place where Colleen would grow up to do great things.

Colleen feared that, despite her faithfulness, Donna Reed might never discover her. With each passing week, she became more anxious. She had to be with Donna Reed, to live the perfect life she could now only observe. She nagged her foster mother and father to take her to Donna Reed, or to at least let her call Donna Reed and tell her to come. They laughed at Colleen and said no and shook their heads and said their house was Colleen’s home. She screamed at them, tore at her clothes, and when everyone went to bed, tried to call Donna Reed. The operator laughed at Colleen, too, and said she didn’t have Donna Reed’s number.

Frustrated and desperate, Colleen packed a grocery sack with some of her things, hid it in the backyard in some bushes by the alley, then picked it up after school the same day and started walking to Hollywood. Donna Reed lived there according to Colleen’s foster brother, who was older than Colleen and who had offered her a dollar to let him peek at her private parts.

The police picked Colleen up that evening, shortly after she asked a man at a gas station for directions to Hollywood.

She spent a long time in the group home after that. The older kids wouldn’t let her watch the Donna Reed Show. They made fun of her and told her Donna Reed was an actress and the family on television was not a real family, just a bunch of actors. They said no families lived that way. Colleen fought them when they said these things, flailing at them, her fists tight balls of bone. She feared that once spoken, if left unchallenged, the words would take on a life of their own and become true. She had to pound the words back into them, make them take back what they said, and admit they lied.

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The Donna Reed Show eventually went off the air. Colleen grew up and became a governess for the children of a rich man and his wife. Whenever the children asked Colleen about her childhood, she would relate incidents from episodes of the Donna Reed Show as if they had happened to her.

One spring, the rich man took his family on a cruise in the Caribbean. Colleen accompanied them to monitor the children. While dining at the captain’s table, the rich man’s wife introduced Colleen to a prince of finance, Thomas Woodson.

The next day and the day after that and for the duration of the cruise, Thomas Woodson accompanied Colleen through the sun-splashed days and starry nights as she carried out her duties. Colleen imagined Thomas was her husband, and the children she supervised were their offspring: a boy and a girl, perfect.

In the morning of next to the last day at sea, while the children strung colored beads on a thread, Thomas proposed marriage. The captain pronounced them man and wife in the ship’s chapel that evening. Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Woodson spent their first night together on the water.

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Thank you for reading Part 1. Part 2 will publish on Monday, June 8th. In it, the fairy tale marriage takes a dark turn.