SET: A low bed with scrim behind it, a table, a sewing machine, surrounded by a garden. Old couple in the bed. CHORUS member (white-clothed) brings out SUN.
Couple yawn, stretch, wake up, perform yoga sun salutations in perfect harmony together, smiling frequently at each other.
They dance a warm, familiar dance – then he goes to the garden, she goes to the sewing machine. She is making a quilt, holding up different-colored patches, trying different arrangements. In the background we see him gathering flowers, trying different arrangements. White-clothed Chorus removes sun. Black-clothed chorus brings out MOON.
Husband puts flowers and vegetables in wheelbarrow and brings them to wife – she displays her quilt, he shows off his produce, they dance joyously, make flower crowns for each other, sit down to eat. They then perform yoga moon salutations in perfect harmony, then get in bed under the new quilt. We see something that might be sex, might only be hugging and stroking. Sleep.
Chorus removed MOON brings in SUN. WOMAN rises, pushes man. Nothing. She gets out of bed, begins disturbed sun salutations, but interrupting constantly to touch him, push him. Finally realizes he is dead; his arm & head fall out of the bed in a too-obviously dead way. Distress. She seeks in the garden for others – calling. The white-clothed CHORUS appears, comforting her, checking the body, dancing sorrowfully with her, trying to keep her from the body, trying to get her to eat, to dance. She resists; angry; sad. SUN trades with MOON.
CHORUS lifts the body to take away, she insists on covering it with quilt. Chorus helps her into bed, she kicks off her covers; lies like stone. Finally closes her eyes. Might be asleep. HUSBAND appears behind scrim, trying to reach through scrim to her. Finally she wakes up, touches him through scrim, without seeming to be able not to see, only feel, him. She rises up, presses her body against his through the scrim. They dance around the stage, always with the scrim between them but their bodies locked close. Still, they are not able to get through the all-encompassing scrim.
Finally the black clothed CHORUS appears, pulls him away from her through the audience – he is reaching toward her, unwilling to go. She reaches toward him, but he is gone. Wife sits dejected. Finally she takes down the scrim, sniffing it like an animal, dances reminiscently with it, shakes it out. Of course it’s not alive. She folds it up, regards it thoughtfully. Takes it to her sewing machine where she turns it into a fantastic see-through dress, like a wedding dress with a deep skirt, flounces, full sleeves. Puts it on, dances joyously for the first time since the death. Pulls the MOON into her dance. SUN appears, she pulls him too, the three dance wildly together. At the back of the stage another scrim, previously invisible, is lit. Behind it we see the HUSBAND yearning to join their dance. Then he, too begins to dance, with increasing joy until they all are dancing. Dancing.
It was hard leaving Brenda. Morton Pinkney Fitzgibbons III looked out the airplane window at his own reflection in the blue lights. His parents didn’t like Brenda. They hadn’t even allowed her to come to the airport. They were always saying disapprovingly how he hadn’t been the same since he’d met her. They didn’t bother concealing their relief that his college was so far away, or smirking that Brenda’s family finances didn’t run to bicoastal airfares. This way she couldn’t “pester” him, they said. Morty had spent the past four years giving it everything he had to get into a prestigious college, but he wondered if he didn’t hate himself a little bit for giving in so easily, for not standing up to them. But heck, just a few months ago he’d been a little kid.
They were absolutely right when they said he wasn’t the same, and about time too. He’d hardly dated any girls in prep school – date-nights at his all-male school were so formalized he’d pretty much backed off and let his mother do the heavy lifting. None of the girls she picked were easy. She must give them a questionnaire, or a job interview, or something to determine their absolute hopelessness as potential girlfriends. Right from the first Brenda was different. Not just a girl to “begin”, to “experiment” on, as he had imagined in his lonely self- projections. She was the girl. In restaurants people already turned to stare at her and she was only seventeen. It actually was kind of insulting the way his parents attributed his new maturity completely to Brenda. Showed what a spineless jellyfish they’d always considered him.
That jellyfish, swimming down the darkly stained oak halls of his worthless school, that wasn’t his real self at all. Anyone who knew anything knew that. Look at his reports: “Morton seems to have deep reserves he has yet to draw on” and “excellent work but hardly to capacity.” The school psychologist said, “Doesn’t let anyone get close” and “polite but uncooperative.” Like you could study The Prince in class all day and then make a “buddy” out of the school shrink! What kind of retard did they take him for?
That creature walking through the halls of Asbury Prep had been more like an animated corpse, or an “astral double”. The real Morty was sleeping, was gathering power. Gathering strength. The real Morty wouldn’t waste his time with their version of “leadership” – because their version of leadership was servanthood. The real Morty was a Champion.
Pretending to empower you, the school actually harnessed you. Drained you. They demanded lying, insisted on evasion, mandated phoniness and reveled in fakery – they didn’t care who the hell you really were at all. And it wasn’t just Morty who noticed it. Not a kid on his floor dared reveal his true self. Every authentic interaction sapped you – because it turned you into a sap — better hold your fire. Save enough force so you could become who you needed to be, who you were meant to be, later on.
The plane was taxiing to its runway. Morty kept his face averted, absorbing the blue light, so his father wouldn’t attempt conversation. He felt a strange prickling inside his forehead, but it wasn’t pain. When he met Brenda he was taking pills for ulcers, pills for attention, for sleeplessness, for cluster headaches. Turned out all he needed was sex. That as the big secret they had been keeping all those years! He guessed it was like being in the army – they kept you deprived to keep you passive. Once you discovered that, you mastered confidence. Each time he locked loins with Brenda freed him a little more. The soggy curtain that had separated him from the universe since childhood fell away. He didn’t need the pills anymore. It made better financial sense to sell them. When he felt this tingling in his forehead he imagined himself head-butting the universe — breaking the glass that separated him from the world.
Morty picked at the weird fabric of the airplane’s window curtain with his thumbnail. What was this stuff? It was some kind of man-made junk, not plastic, not cloth, more like Fiberglas. That was the trouble with the world these days. Nothing was real. People had been pushing fakes so long they forgot what reality was. Sex was real.
Connecticut dropped away below him until there was nothing left to see. But still he kept his face averted, hoping his father wouldn’t pull the trigger on another awkward, pathetic conversation. He liked his father – would have said he loved him if love wasn’t a feeling now reserved for Brenda alone. But his father was a decoy, some kind of “staked goat” offered to lure him into letting down his guard.
His father used to write music – had a band even back when they lived in Stoneyport – but one of the incontestable facts about Stoneyport was that if you lived there year round, you were nobody. So it was just their summer place now and his father was too busy tending other people’s money to waste any more time on progressive jazz. “Progressive jazz” wasn’t even a “thing” anymore, even, nobody did it, nobody had even heard of it. His father’s time was up. The old man tried not-so- subtly to blame the kids – they all did that — that was the way grown-ups operated – you were the reason for everything! They did it for you! Guilt, the gift that keeps on giving. At school they were always after you to “assume responsibility”. The school’s motto was “No excuses.” If the dog really ate your homework you needed punishment for having such a freakin’ unruly dog. Morty had been trained to recognize buck-passing by the best-in- show. He knew exactly whose fault everything was. Take his mom for instance. She was a screamer.
She had a super-simple business model: just yell and scream till you get what you want. Amazing how effective it was. Nobody would pay to get that in the real world – not since the concentration camps closed – but in interpersonal relationships “Making a Scene” was the strategy to beat. No one was willing to go up against her. Nobody could outlast her. The thing that really got his goat was she pretended, in the midst of epic rages, to be a competent, polished adult. Oh, yeah, she set herself up as judge as well as executioner! A day didn’t pass without a tweet, email or sticky note about how he had failed her perfect standards. He was sick of it, really. The degrading scenes, the room searches, the “white glove” inspections. He had long since learned to leave nothing personal, nothing of any importance in his room.
He could imagine her prowling around when he wasn’t there – feeling up his underwear and sneaking looks beneath his mattress, hoping to find the weed, the smokes, the girly mags she could get her wail on about. Nothing there; but there were always Brenda’s phone calls and text messages good for a public session of electro-shock; a thong trophy lifted from her son’s blazer pocket or the wet scrap of bikini discarded on the cabana floor. Scream-a-thon if Morty was using condoms; Shriek-
a-thon if he wasn’t; take your pick. Good thing she couldn’t get a hold of Brenda’s mom – there was no dad – or she would have made her life a living hell. But Brenda’s mom was one of those unlucky females forced to actually contribute to society instead of just yelling at people – she lived at work – and hospital dispatch don’t take personal calls.
Morty’s mom was fat. That was her real trouble. Morbid obesity. Her body was so swollen that from a distance she looked like a tiny block placed atop a big one. If anyone ever said anything about dieting – even diets in general – Elsa the She-Wolf went right upstairs and cried. Then she came downstairs and screamed harder. She actually forced her kids to eat ice cream. Bizarre. Morty could burn it off and his father preferred alcohol but it wasn’t doing his little sister any favors. His mom’s fashion solution was to wrap herself in shawls. Not working. Who asked for a Hungarian peasant woman for a mother? Frankly, it was embarrassing. There was his tall, distinguished, tired father partnering Hulda the Witch to school events. Bad.
She was sitting behind him now, talking to Gracie in a baby voice, trying to “persuade” her not to kick her father’s seat back. Gracie was ignoring her — poor Gracie wasn’t able to stand up for herself yet, so passive aggression was all she had going. What hope could there possibly be for her with an example like that? She was finished before she started. Morty knew – he had been forced to listen – that she wasn’t in the “popular” group at her school and surprise! Screaming and threats failed to fix the situation. Face it: his mom made everything worse. Your misery was her modus operandi in life.
Morty hated leaving Brenda. Everybody said college was so great, but what if college turned out to be another Asbury Prep in disguise? A place where “Gentlemen’s Agreement” meant upperclassmen torturing underclassmen for three long years? Could he stand it? It would be a relief getting away from his parents. His Mom was getting harder to fool – and his dad was sinking so fast it was politer to avert your gaze.
Mom had allowed Morty to invite Brenda to his pool party. It was all a trick of course. She was trying to find out if they’d been “seeing each other behind her back”. Belligerent as a tank in her red-skirted suit she’d gathered steam watching Brenda lounging in her invisible bikini, belly jewels and hummingbird tats. Swim-suited Morty tried to convince his Mom that his circular red weals were “wrestling burns”; that was a hard enough sell, but when Morty’s father rubbed sunscreen along Brenda’s shoulders Hulda blew like Vesuvius. Only coming down at midnight to make herself spaghetti.
On the way to the airport the screaming was particularly intense. She lashed them, beat them, drubbed them all with waves of sound; then, the minute they hit the ticket counter she snapped out of it like the psycho from Three Faces of Eve. Sybil from the suburbs.
Now Mom was taking Gracie to the bathroom. Didn’t trust an eleven year old to go alone. Morty closed his eyes but he could imagine the horrible scene in the aisle, his mother’s huge hips bumping into everything, her tight black dress riding up in little ridges around knees and waist. He vividly imagined her falling into the laps of a pair of horrified strangers, struggling with flight-attendants, burping and farting and shrieking while the pilot appeared personally to help place her in restraints. If only.
There must be something pleasurable he could do with his imagination; playing Vice Cop3 or texting Brenda a note to send when cellphones were allowed. But completely unbidden a new thought popped into his head. What if they were dead? All of them.
Now a new vision; himself walking down an antiseptic corridor, a doctor shaking his head like a metronome. Repeating, “I’m so sorry, sorry, sorry…” Then Morty could call Brenda, even in the middle of the night, never mind about her beauty sleep, telling her, “We’re rich.”
Because he would be, wouldn’t he? Even though his parents moaned and groaned about the expense of two homes and their crushing load of debt, there were retirement funds and college accounts and a pile of insurance because Hulda wasn’t getting left penniless like her own mother had been.
Morty and Brenda would go to Europe — she had never seen it — he could show her all the places he knew and all the places he didn’t know. Wasn’t making love to Brenda under all the bridges of Paris the only education really worth having?
He reached in his pocket and felt the satiny scrap Brenda had left for him, and it was so reminiscent of her all the blood left his tingling forehead and tumesced between his legs. Morty pulled down his tray table to conceal his excitement.
But how could he do it? He summoned up the whole of his first class education: the difference between a wish and a goal was a plan. Three people were a lot to ask for. How about a car crash? That would be a start. Get him out of college and visiting a hospital, then he would see what he could do. His parents were renting a car to drive back home so they could see Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon and all the other boring obligatory stuff. His father always drove because of his mother’s bad back, and he always carried coffee in case he felt sleepy. Morty still had plenty of sleeping pills; easy enough to give his father a doctored thermos as a thoughtful, parting gift. His mother never drank coffee, she insisted on Earl Grey and if you couldn’t provide that, God help you. It was a plan. A shy, modest beginning of a little plan, but unmistakably, a plan. He drummed his fingers ecstatically on his plastic tray table.
His father had obviously been awaiting just such a conversational opportunity. “Hungry for airplane food?” he teased. Morty said, “Hungry for everything.”
Right after we were married, my husband and his mother went into the business of renovating aging Philadelphia buildings into modern apartments. Toss sank all his money into this endeavor. As the partnership progressed, a lot of problems with my mother-in-law surfaced. She was personally combative and talked continually about her own unhappy marriage and angry divorce, as if they had just happened or were still happening. Her constant hostility destroyed any chance of a good personal relationship between us. She ignored the contract that she had signed with my husband, she used construction money to purchase a property for herself, and she stopped paying the lenders. I had been forced to sign onto every loan, so, when we were inevitably sued by the bank, I was also sent constant legal demands that I come in and give depositions. Toss and I sold our house to pay back the bank, but when we moved into one of the apartments, my mother-in-law sued us. I was studying psychology at the time and could see that she had deeper problems than just an abrasive business approach.
Throughout this horrible state of affairs my husband kept hoping his mother would come to her senses. He was extremely upset by her behavior and even became suicidal at times. I had two small children and couldn’t figure out the best thing to do. I consulted a divorce attorney but realized that I didn’t want a different husband, I wanted a different life.
At this time my own family sold our summer place in Maine and I gained a sudden influx of cash. I decided to use it to get my husband away from his mother and into a new life. There was certainly the possibility that he would feel obligated to choose her, or his “financial best interests” or just feel emotionally unable to leave his situation.
Through the nine years of our marriage and the seven years of my husband’s partnership we had found joy and release visiting his family summer place, Ravine Falls Farm, in the Berkshires, and it seemed to make sense to choose somewhere near there. Hartford was the nearest big city and Connecticut appeared halcyon and clean; almost a paradise in comparison to Philadelphia. The children were six and two at the time; as soon as I received my psychology degree from All Saints the three of us took off to explore the Hartford suburbs. Manchester, “Silk City”; “The City Of Village Charm” seemed just perfect. I bought a cute little new townhouse and enrolled the kids in school. It took Toss only a few months to decide to join me. He hired a lawyer to extract him from his partnership and he found a wonderful job at the Connecticut Law Tribune which combined his writing skills and legal knowledge and stayed employed there twenty-three years! We were a happy family again. My bravery paid off.
By sophomore year, I had been at PLUMLY for one year and thought I knew my way around. My pack of girl buddies crashed the orientation meeting to check out the new blood of incoming males. One guy had long blond hair that hung like a sheet over his handsome face. Nice body to match. I thought he looked like Rupert Brooke, cut out his picture and pasted it in my diary. Walking behind him, I became hypnotized by rhythmic flashes of bare skin and platinum hair through the holes in his jeans. He wore oil of cloves on his shirt collars and I have been hypnotized by it ever since.
But when we talked, we clashed. He was bossy and I was accustomed to being the bossy one. It took three full years for him to soften up enough to date me. He worked his way through the most intelligent girls in our class, but I had a different reputation than simple intelligence. I was considered dangerously sexy; “a handful” and with a tendency to bring in outside men. We appeared in Hamlet as husband and wife; he was The Ghost and I was Gertrude. After his death he came back as an underling to help carry my sizable dead body offstage. As he did so, he commented favorably on my thigh muscles. He offered to buy me a peach ice cream cone and while we strolled the Granolithic, he invited me to Class Day Dinner, a long and depressing awards ceremony (I won the Class of 1914 Reading Prize for reading the most books in the library) and where we were treated to good food and coffee. (Only seniors were allowed coffee.)
For such a bossy person, he was surprisingly interesting to talk to. All our important conversations were painfully truncated by frustrating interruptions for stupid things like studying and exams. One night I heard him calling softly beneath my window – he had a sleeping bag and we snuggled up in the dark woods. He had terrific self-control so kissing, touching and being touched by him were the highlights of my teenage years. We became particularly fond of a certain field of barley and on one occasion he had to give me his shirt to wear to my music exam because mine was so embarrassingly grass-stained. He loved the barley field; I preferred a treehouse lost in the woods.
Somehow we passed our exams and graduated. Then came the enormous pleasure of each other’s company at Senior Parties – endless pool and dance bashes at a series of big local houses that went all night and all weekend. I felt like I was wandering through novels by Fitzgerald, stories by Cheever, poems by Plath. He appreciated all my literary references, unlike all previous boyfriends who were bored and irritated by my “unreal” world. Also, he liked to dance which was considered déclassé by most of the Plumly intellectuals. We wound up at his house, a gated, half-timbered Main Line basilica with pool and guest house where a railroad baron used up his extra railroad ties to reinforce a kitchen wall. His parents were having far too bad a marriage to supervise us and we spent the night together in such a narrow bed we had to sleep on top of each other, which was fine. Toss declared love, surprising me; another déclassé “de-powering” move according to all my previous boyfriends. His mother was actively hostile and his father looked like a “Missing” poster. Toss showed me his dark room where he produced gorgeous arty black and white photos. He sold me on the magic of cameras but I could not reproduce his stripped-down visions since my art was all about development, pentimento and adding on. Toss’s folks signed him up for driving and speedreading classes, to keep him busy, while I was supposed to be preparing at Pendle Hill for my graduation trip to Europe. To make things harder, we were not on the same train line but had to travel into the city and back out on the Paoli local or to Chestnut Hill; even using different train terminals. Mine was at Reading Market with all the cheese, ice cream and sandwich pleasures imaginable. Toss took me to dinner at The Peale Club which was supposed to be a Big Deal although it seemed to me the staff despised the dues-paying members. I preferred the Market.
One night we were swimming in his pool and his father came home unexpectedly. I hid under the sofa and listened to them discuss me until Toss felt safe enough to introduce me. Far from angry, his father was visibly envious as he drove me home. Then I was off for Europe, but mentally I was in the pool house with Toss. He sent me a photo taken by a friend of himself, shirtless, eating cherries directly from a fallen tree. I thought it was the most erotic thing I had ever seen and took the next plane home.
Toss and his family drove me to their farm in the Berkshires, a family-owned, four house, six hundred acre spread. He taught me target shooting in the barn while I tried to argue him into losing our virginities. He didn’t feel right about it in a location stalked by venomous mothers, raging aunts and disapproving grandmas. Toss’s father set up an easel on the dam and painted a portrait of the pond while we swam and lazed on giant inner tubes.
On the way home the Mercedes experienced a vapor lock just as Toss’s mother was bragging about what wonderful cars they were and we were all trapped together while the engine cooled down. Toss had been accepted at Williams but he told me it wasn’t far enough away, he planned to attend Reed College in Oregon. I planned a short story in which a college-bound boy murders his parents to get free of them.
My parents were in Europe and our big house was empty; a perfect locale for the night of passion I envisioned. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t stop bleeding, and because Toss couldn’t yet drive, he had to get the college girl from across the street to take me to the hospital, where I required stitches. Trying to get permission for surgery I called my aunt, a noted blabbermouth. (She told me afterwards that I had almost certainly “turned” Toss gay.) Worst of all my parents arrived home to a bloody bathtub and a pair of Toss’s underpants with his phone number helpfully labeled inside. Toss told them I was at Lankenau Hospital, where I was shaved and given a rubber pillow to sit on. My father was very understanding, my mother less so. This situation forced me and Toss to take things much more slowly to our enormous mutual pleasure.
Toss’s mother sent him to an uncle in Ohio to get him away from me. She was afraid his political future would be imperiled if he listened to my father and became a conscientious objector. Toss’s father disappeared to California where he had discovered a warm, supportive girlfriend.
My uncle offered me a plane ticket to visit him in California; I jumped at the chance. Because isn’t California practically Oregon? I surprised Toss at Reed with my red coat and matching red luggage. He hastily evicted his high school-age girlfriend and welcomed me with open arms but it was not the same. I really disliked Reed where everyone seemed to be into drugs. We attended a psilocybin wedding in the chapel which I considered the far side of stupid.
We both flew down to visit my uncle in Hollywood; he took us up in his plane and showed us the sights. Toss fled, and I was stuck alone with this guy who was handsy and weird. I spent my nineteenth birthday at Caesar’s Hotel in Tijuana eating oysters Rockefeller. Luckily I was able to keep my uncle out of my bed. I came home, considerably crestfallen, and enrolled at the Philadelphia Academy of Dance for lack of any better plan.
When Toss returned home in May I drove our huge wood-paneled station wagon over to Merion to give him a birthday surprise. Making out with him I managed to lose my contacts and had to spend the night; one more ecstatic night; rewarded in the morning with a Dear Jane letter in which he said he was off to Maine to spread his wild oats. I didn’t hear from him again until I was engaged to Bruce. He sent me a long, irritating letter about graduating from Reed with a thesis on H. L. Mencken (of course! A woman hater!) and I was able to smugly respond that I was totally over him and on to someone new who REALLY appreciated me.
Dead silence for eight years until the Plumly alumni directory came out and I rushed to look Toss up. UNMARRIED! I thought so! I wrote a poem in exultation. In the spring of 1979 I got a letter. He also had looked me up and knew I was divorced. He was enrolled at Chase College of Law and would be spending the summer interning with Ralph Nader in Washington D.C. a mere ten miles from the house I’d just bought in West Hyattsville. He asked for my number; what was I doing? Did I want to see him? Could he call me?
I said Yes and Sure although I was nervous about telling him I was a dancer because that conversation hadn’t gone well with any of his competition. Luckily, I could arrange my schedule around him, if I chose. I invited him to dinner at the glamorous new 5 bedroom, 3 bath house I had just bought. He brought a friend to meet the sister who shared my quarters. As the time approached I got more and more nervous until I was lying on the floor begging my sister: “WHAT DOES HE LOOK LIKE?” And Avril said, “He looks exactly the same.” I jumped up and served everyone goblets of bourbon. He was still beautiful, but to me he did look different. Thinner, sadder, but still fascinating. We cooked swordfish on the outdoor gas grill as I showed off my house. He told me he had also bought a 5 bedroom house in Covington, Kentucky (he called it the Hermes Hilton.)
We reminisced about Plumly, but when I reminded him about the treehouse he insisted it must have been someone else. I read him my poem about it; he STILL didn’t remember! Angrily I hauled the trunk of diaries out from beneath my four-poster bed and showed him the relevant passage. He was awestruck by my mastery of memory. At that moment I realized, “This might work” and we tumbled into bed together. Since then there hasn’t been anyone else for either of us. Ten days later he confessed he had never loved anyone but me and asked me to marry him. We got so excited we called up the blabbermouth aunt. (She asked, “Are you SURE he’s not gay?” Her husband WAS.) We decided to have two children, a boy and a girl, and to name them Shasta and Shane. He ordered a case of Moet Chandon and we took off up the coast to tell our parents.
But first we had to stop at Plumly, to find the treehouse. It wasn’t there. We were wandering around the woods when a man stopped us and asked what we were looking for. We explained we were two Plumlies who’d just gotten engaged and hadn’t there been a treehouse? Yes, but it had fallen down long since. He showed us the tragic rubble, then invited us into his beautiful new home where he offered us sherry by the fire and introduced himself as the new headmaster. From the way he looked at us I could tell he knew we were soulmates. And we knew it too.
In the spring of 1975 I quit my job as an administrative assistant to a group of Baltimore architects and gave myself an extended vacation in Maine. I was divorced and very frustrated with the dating scene in Baltimore which seemed oriented around married older career men and young, hopeful, not very smart women. My best friend who had hired me for the position was having an extended relationship with our married boss, which I saw as revolting. She got very excited about the “black pearls” he gave her and the vacations they took where he could show off her gorgeous youthful body and his hideous elderly one at sun-drenched locations.
I myself had an unhappy relationship with the unmarried art director (we actually lived together for awhile) which was obviously going nowhere and I was drinking too much. He got fired (not sure why) and his subsequent meltdown gave me a good excuse to get out of there.
My parents had just bought a house on Round the Mountain Road, Vinalhaven Island, that they hoped would allow them to live on the island year-round, our property on the shore being more of a “camp”. This house had water access, a boathouse, and a fantastic greenhouse off the dining room filled with spectacular camellias. Just after my parents bought it my father was surprised to be offered a job by Pennsylvania’s governor Milton Shapp to manage the finances of his presidential campaign. My parents rushed down to Washington where the action was and rented an amazing two bedroom, two bathroom apartment on the sixteenth floor of Veazey Towers overlooking Rock Creek Park.
Dad offered to pay me to winter in the Round the Mountain Road house and keep the camellias alive (which I successfully did, in spite of having no gardening aptitude whatsoever.) I set up my office in the greenhouse and wrote my first novel, Devlyn, surrounded by all the Victorian novels I had ever admired. I wanted to cash in on the trend and write a “gothic” novel, but the fun for me was, could I write a real Victorian novel? It was a treat to try. I had a great idea in the fact that one of my favorite authors Thomas Love Peacock, friend of Shelley and author of Nightmare Abbey, had actually adopted an impoverished village girl and treated her like a daughter. The question was, why? And what happened next?
I spent the winter writing it out and getting an agent. I had an abortive relationship with an unmarried local realtor who turned out to have extremely primitive relationship ideas (ugh) and I was offered a serious relationship by the handsomest man on the island, a real sweetie of a fisherman. But to stay, permanently on Vinalhaven Island! To be a fisherman’s wife! Couldn’t imagine it. Turned him down gracefully (we hadn’t even dated) and he went on to marry the prettiest and worst-behaved girl on the island who led him a nightmare dance of several years until their subsequent divorce and he’s now happily married to a career-woman divorcee (with children) who can’t believe her good fortune. This hothouse trap is what islands are like and I knew to stay away. One of my previous colleague architects (whom I really knew only in passing) drove all the way up from Baltimore and suffered an hour ferry ride to the island to visit me with romance on his mind. But he was married! So by spring I was more than ready to trade houses with Mom and Dad and move down to their apartment in Washington, D.C. and see if I could scare up an interesting job. (They had to leave when Milt Shapp’s finances went under investigation by the FBI.) My sister Avril left Wilmington College in Ohio for the summer and joined me.
I certainly knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to be office handmaid to a group of professional men offering low salaries and zero vacation. I considered working for an environmental group, selling art on commission in a gallery, and I tried out an employment agency whose offered jobs were never what they said they were. When I found a classified ad for go-go dancers I was intrigued. After all, I did have a background in dance, having studied at Martha Graham in NYC and the Philadelphia Academy of Dance and I loved dancing at clubs. Avril and I went to the agency to “audition” and met Deedee, its proprietor. The job was wearing bikinis and go-go boots and dancing for the troops at military installations around Washington. There were a lot of venues! Two “gigs” were possible a day – afternoon and evening – and they would be only an hour to two hours, shared with another dancer. Bet of all, you only worked when you wanted to! Avril couldn’t stomach the idea, (she took a job dispatching messengers) but I was willing to try it.
It certainly was an interesting experience! I drove everywhere, to bases, Navy Yards, officers’ clubs, hospitals and air stations. The men were extremely polite and sometimes tipped. I learned to navigate the Washington DC area, and even briefly dated a naval lieutenant I met at an officer’s club in Virginia. My free-wheeling Quaker/artistic/peacenik background clashed horribly with his career plans, however.
Most interesting were the other dancers. All of them were career dancers who combined occasional gigs for Deedee’s agency with dancing in local clubs. I soon discovered the clubs in Virginia were considered the best because the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms vigilantes enforced audience distance from the dancers, who stayed in the dressing room when not on stage. Stockings, pasties and g-string were the required outfit, and the money was better than anything Deedee could pay. Three dancers worked per hour, so a set was twenty minutes. Less driving, more money, and a physical workout. It sounded good to me! My sister and I rented a three bedroom house in Chevy Chase, I auditioned for the Ad Lib in Alexandria, Virginia and was hired by Gentleman Jim, the manager. That’s how I got started dancing.
Alysse Aallyn 