Alysse Aallyn

Category: Memoir

  • Learning to Write

    I always wanted to be a writer but writing felt almost too intimate ever to be my career. Other people didn’t seem to like it when I told the truth and always tried pushing me in a different direction. I kept a diary from the time I was nine years old and journaling became necessary to iron out my thoughts, develop them and see who I was becoming. From an early age my stories and poems didn’t meet much family support. If it wasn’t humorous, my parents weren’t interested. My father acted offended. “You wouldn’t want me to say it’s good when it isn’t, right?” My mother laughed her way through my short story about child sexual abuse: (To Bed in the Afternoon) “Isn’t it a joke?” School was more helpful because English teachers typically recognized and encouraged my gift. Fellow students, not so much. The areas I wanted to explore – personality contradictions, alienation, disappointment – were deemed pointlessly anarchistic. I read a lot and particularly liked mysteries involving masterful re-interpretations of confusing and frightening events. I remember excitedly opening Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd recommended by a teacher but dropping it as soon as Goodman declared girls were not subject to any of the pressures he described. Idiot!

    I was particularly frustrated at Plumly, my Quaker boarding school, which was reputed to be educationally advanced.  Their slow crawl through the likes of Steinbeck, London and Melville threw me into full rebellion. I did not encounter a single memorable writer in the English syllabus there and lobbied unsuccessfully for the inclusion of at least some women writers (my paper on Francoise Sagan was frigidly received.) When I complained to my parents, they joked that maybe I’d be happier at Catholic military school. It seemed I was going to have to construct my own education. The nineteenth century proved a good place to start – blazing with impressive women writers – ultimately bearing fruit in my first novel, Devlyn.

    My experience at Plumly was so bad I couldn’t imagine going straight to college but took a “gap year” flirting with acting and dance. Fame would be nice, but what I secretly hoped for was fulfilling and supportive romantic love. I was able to talk my parents into paying for an apt on West 56th Street in New York City where I enrolled at Circle in the Square Theatre School and the Martha Graham School of Dance. Even though I got the lead in the acting class play I thought I was horrible and I was never happy expressing other people’s ideas that I couldn’t agree with right when I was trying to figure out my own ideas. The most profound memory I have of that period was feeling people trying to control me and me not wanting to be controlled. But could freedom be found? My own background strongly suggested marriage was a place where I could flourish – once I found someone who loved me and believed in me couldn’t I let my husband worry about the money? That seemed to be something men naturally wanted to do, while my knowledge of Mom’s Chestnut Hill friends was of women living in artistic paradises created by their own hands. Sure looked good to me!

    My first boyfriend after Plumly’s Toss was an actor named Armon Hyle. He was talented theatrically and deeply sensitive and artistic. I followed him to Lawrence University but persuaded him to transfer to Antioch in Maryland where I could study writing – and there I ran into my first husband, the multi-talented Bruce Burke.

    Bruce was a musician and a writer and dripped with charm. In fact, my writing teacher far preferred his writing to mine although I was fairly certain she was really ensnared by his beauty, as most people were. I considered Bruce’s poetry “masculinist” (i.e. idiotic) and I stalwartly refused to be critiqued by him, or even by my writing teacher who kept trying to make me “write like The New Yorker.” (Later she hired me to ghostwrite a novel for her. It was called The Colors of Love if I remember right and we did ell it but I thought it was pretty ghastly dreck.) I was struggling to write a novel about adolescence that tried to expose the general craziness of non-conforming parents who want you to conform, but I kept tripping over the Problem of Sexuality and was getting nowhere. I also wrote awful (feminist) poetry attempting to skewer my fluctuating psychological and emotional states. My job at the time was as the only paid employee of a community theatre whose director was a predatory sexual harasser. My relationship with Bruce kept him in check. Bruce had a band, Bad Heart, which played all over Maryland and DC on the same bill with better known musicians like Emmylou Harris and Judy Collins. It was fun travelling to David’s concerts, getting to know musicians, roadies, groupies and especially his charming manager, Bubbles (who used to tell me, “Alysse, you need to get your gothic ass in gear.”)

    Bruce was older; he’d been married and divorced, been to Vietnam, been to jail. When he asked me to marry him I was elated. Marriage was in particularly bad repute at the time, but I thought my parents might accept him, which they grudgingly did. Our fun wedding at the Quaker Meeting on Jan 1, 1972 was everything I wanted, except that the harmonium player couldn’t make it through the snowstorm, and afterwards we drove to Vermont to stay with one of his roadies at a ski chalet. Right away, Bruce and I clashed. What I thought would be a ski weekend was actually a drug weekend and I refused to participate. Bruce was irked. According to him, you HAVE to do what everybody wants to do. But I had spent my entire life resisting that!

    So after the wedding I discovered that my husband was a man who simply said anything other people wanted to hear. I was completely unprepared for somebody like that; I had been taken in, like everyone else. He talked my father into investing in his band, he talked a friend into investing in his album, he never did any of the things he said he was going to do with the money, always leaving me to apologize (and grovel), picking up the pieces.

    He wanted to be where the action was, but I wanted to live in the country where I could write my novel. Almost immediately after our marriage his mother died, and using their tiny inheritance, he and his brother bought a farm in Devil’s Elbow, New York where real estate was incredibly cheap. The peace and quiet was just what I had been looking for. I immediately plunged into a novel about a lesbian relationship (Flycatcher.) It was really about the relationship of a mother to an unacceptable daughter, and the mother’s search for a perfect daughter but it was painfully inchoate. In the meantime, Bruce was touring, taking drugs and being unfaithful because “that’s what everyone expects.”

    Our marriage, his relationship with his brother and with his investors were all on the rocks, so we sold the farm and moved back to Maryland to complete our college degrees. I needed a job and I needed to get rid of Bruce – I told him he could have the rest of the house money if he would just split, which he happily did. He had some bridges in England he needed to burn.

    It wasn’t till my parents offered a housesit in Maine that I was able to actually complete and sell a novel, but although it sold 100,000 copies (paperback) it didn’t provide the kind of money you could actually live on. Worse, the publishing connections I had made assumed I would write to specification, while I had a whole psyche left to explore! Once again, marriage (much happier this time) and children (who turned out to contain the secret of the meaning of life!) intervened.

    I wasn’t able to work on my second novel until 2002. I had been studying true crime for the past decade, increasingly intrigued and absorbed: here were ready made, real plots that explicated the very questions of identity, self-presentation, power, truth will and justice that had always obsessed me. With Find Courtney, I was off and running – and to my intense artistic satisfaction, Woman Into Wolf, Depraved Heart and I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead quickly followed with fabulous reviews. Unimpressive sales led me back to the theatre, where one forges a more immediate connection with the audience. With every play, The Honey & The Pang (Emily Dickinson), Queen of Swords (murderous stepmother), Cuck’d (Othello), Caving (quantum physics), Rough Sleep (the multiverse), The Dalingridge Horror (Virginia Woolf) I find out more and more about myself and the world I’m living in. Writing full-time to please yourself is the greatest joy there is.

  • Remembering my Father

    CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTION

    Famously, my father was a conscientious objector. He wrote all about it in his book, Not By Might. He grew up in a home where his mother had divested herself of the religion she was born with by becoming a member of the Church of the New Jerusalem, a follower of the writings of mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg.

    My father needed to work to contribute to his college education and so matriculated at 5 year Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, just south of Cleveland where he grew up. It was a “Society of Friends” school, so this was his introduction to Quakerism, and it came just in the nick of time, 1937; the run-up to World War II. He always talked reverently about the classes of Professor Mukherjee, who proved to his complete satisfaction that there could not possibly be a God. This freed my father from the oppressively militaristic and jingoistic attitudes of his origin family. He was incredulous that I, forty years later, wanted to attend a Catholic college and study mysticism. He liked that Quakerism didn’t insist followers agree on a creed; what dogma they had he applauded. To him it seemed stupid to solve diplomatic problems with threats of violence and soldiers. He completely embraced Gandhi’s theory of “ahimsa” – greeting abuse with reasoning and peaceful resistance. In fact he, my mother and a few college friends moved into a broken-down family farm, renamed it Ahimsa Farm, and made a good-faith attempt at communal farming.

    When it became time for him to register for the war he announced he was a conscientious objector. The draft board, accusing him of cowardice for not wanting to go to Europe and be killed, sent him to Federal prison at Ashland, Kentucky. He was very afraid his first night there, but he soon made friends with the wide array of conscientious objectors of all faiths. Both my mother and father’s families were appalled and used every manipulation from shaming to shunning to talk him out of it. Unsuccessfully. He was finally sent to work in a Friends’ ambulance unit in China, and that experience gave him troves of stories we listened to wide-eyed as children.

    We were very proud of our father but what he couldn’t seem to understand was that by giving me a model of conscientious objection he was also giving me a template to resist him. I’m afraid I drove him crazy! My first objection was to the Quaker boarding school they sent me to (and refused to allow me to leave) which I saw as a nest of the exact same hidebound theocratic hypocrites he had fled from. My second objection was to all the peace demonstrations he (and our Quaker school) wanted me to march in. I didn’t reject social justice per se, but I was annoyed by “group think” and enraged and insulted by the Quaker attitude to art as “self-indulgent”, “hedonistic”, “morbid” and “depraved.”

    Needless to say, my work has been one shock after another as far as they were concerned. They were convinced I was doing it just to upset them, whereas I was trying to understand my own life and “Life” in general in the fine, independent tradition he had laid down for me! When I locked him out of my room he broke down the door: I threw my typewriter at him! Mom read my diary and listened in on my calls – behavior they usually condemned but felt forced to resort to by my unruly adolescence.

    I did manage to graduate from Plumly (I couldn’t WAIT to get out of there) but I certainly didn’t want to go to college which I feared would be more of the same compulsion and obligation. Mom and Dad didn’t help their case by endlessly razzing my older sister Merrill about any interest she had in boys and the interest they inevitably showed in her. Ugh! I decided to go to acting school instead and be discovered. At Circle in the Square in New York City I found out pretty fast that I didn’t want to be an actor. I hated mouthing other people’s lines and was too full of my own ideas. But I did meet an actor there who needed to go back to Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin to avoid the draft and so I went with him.

    There I discovered I was an intellectual! This was a fact Plumly had completely concealed from me through its endless harangues against art and sexuality. I discovered the letters of Elizabeth Gaskell, the diaries of Dorothy Wordsworth, and the wonderful controversies of Shelley scholarship. I studied Russian magical realism and Tillich theology and wanted more.

    Unfortunately, one thing Plumly and my upbringing did give me was a smug sense of political and cultural superiority. My boyfriend’s father was the editor of the Scientific American and his grandmother lived in a 13 room apartment on Park Avenue in New York City but I treated him (and probably his entire family) as pathetically benighted. Every objection either of us had to Lawrence University and Appleton Wisconsin could be solved, I insisted, by transferring to Antioch College! Finally, I was throwing my poor parents a bone. My father as very gratified. We transferred to Antioch’s Columbia, MD campus where everything was “experimental”. What could possibly go wrong?

    Well, it turned out there were no grades and we had to teach the classes ourselves, a fact which outraged my father. (He was paying for this!) I taught a class on women writers and my boyfriend had to travel long distances to secure an acting coach. We split up; I found a new boyfriend who wasn’t averse to marriage (he had been married before.) I saw this as another bone for Mom and Dad, although they acted less than thrilled, even after I told them this guy had been hauled out of Vietnam in military handcuffs. (He was given a dishonorable discharge which I considered a badge of honor.) Still, grumbling, they went ahead with a Quaker wedding. This “solved” nothing; me and my new husband soon had problems up to our eyeballs. After two years after moving, house buying and selling, we were on the rocks and I was working in Baltimore for a group of architects to pay the bills.

    My parents and I had many more clashes over the years; mostly on taste issues since we agreed politically, but there were sadly few opportunities for Principled Conscientious Objection. (Sigh.) I must say I miss them!

  • Mom

    CULTURE AND MY MOTHER

    Most people considered my mother not just the nicest, the most beautiful, but the most cultivated person they had ever met. She said “tomahtoes”, giving many words their English pronunciation; she floated through my childhood in a haze of elegant gardening, French cuisine (she made her own mayonnaise) and general gorgeousness. She had the famous “Marilyn Monroe” dress, sheer white with pleats and v-shaped neckline that she wore to parties with her arty hammered silver hand-and-feet earrings and necklace. She was tall, narrow-hipped and full-breasted, used no makeup except lipstick and she looked like a movie star in old slacks and a Mexican shirt. Grown-up people gazed at her adoringly, and as a child, it was hard to get her attention. It was, however, fairly easy to make her cry. We four sisters played a game my father called “ripflesh” which was basically torture. It was “Lord of the Flies” with girls.

    The sport of Ripflesh was forbidden, making “the Queen” cry was forbidden, and Dad informed us that any promises we extracted from the Queen outside his presence need not be honored.

    Mom was an “early education” specialist, so we had a playroom, a costume trunk, a full collection of puppets and all the Newberry Award-winning children’s books. I wrote my own children’s book based on Harold and the Purple Crayon; Poor Left-Out Harry – which much impressed my parents. They sent it around to their friends and we never got it back. Mom and Dad went to local art galleries and hauled home big modern art paintings by local artists. She enrolled us in modern dance classes taught by Dad’s business partner’s second wife, who wore a pencil through her ponytail and looked like a Feiffer drawing. Our Christmas tree was decorated with Mexican pierced tin ornaments and the modern house with the huge picture windows built to Mom’s specifications had heated polished cement floors.

    She was dismissive of the exciting and sentimental TV, vulgar movies and comics we enjoyed but she did promote Classic Comics, which were my first introduction to Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson. I went on to read and enjoy the books. Visits to museums gave me a fondness for Egyptian art which she fed. She bought me all the Narnia books which I read one after the other.

    Mom used to lock us out of the house so she could have “Quiet Time”. She would tell us to go play in the local arboretum, a haunt of pedophiles and up-to-no-good teenage boys. Luckily we were usually in a group. I was attacked and de-pantsed only once, but managed to get away. When I needed to be alone I climbed a tree. When she wanted us home Mom would yodel fearlessly out the back door. You could hear her for blocks.

    On trips to Europe my mother clutched the Michelin guide and insisted we see the sights. They were usually well worth seeing. My mother and I bonded over medieval, Byzantine and Mannerist art which nobody else in our family liked but which woke me up to a lot of religious and artistic possibilities. We both had a taste for strongly stylized representation. I began to see the echoes of ancient art in modern art; and to be excited by the progression of ideas, experiments and languages. I wrote my own ancient Greek play (Chrysothemis).

    As I became a teenager our tastes diverged. My mother loved beautiful clothes and often had hers tailored and hand-made at considerable expense. She visited China in the days of Mao’s mandated blue uniform and everyone gasped at and wanted to touch her bright pink raincoat. I have a pink raincoat now, in her memory. She ruled out polka dots (I love polka dots) and considered pink and black colors should never be in the same room. (I love pink with black.) She almost never liked my teenage fast fashion, but right before graduation she took me to the local ritzy dress shop Jane Chalfant’s, and bought me a white Walter Lanz graduation dress (they had to be white) and two op-art sundresses with matching bikinis for Senior Parties. She dismissed the outrageous cost, confiding to me, “It’s nice to be rich,” something my father would never publicly admit.

    When I became a dancer she was particularly appalled, and not in the least mollified by my “Colette Was A Nudie Dancer” bumper sticker (she didn’t like Colette, either.)

    We shopped for my wedding dress together on the Philadelphia Main Line but we were both disgusted by the mishmash of sentiment and glitz at bridal shops. (I said it was like buying a casket to inter yourself in.) We found a shop in Bryn Mawr we both liked that sold copies of antique wedding dresses – Ann Pakadrooni’s. I bought a gorgeous puffy-sleeved Edwardian dress of silk moiré with inset lace medallions. We also found her mother-of-the-bride dress, cobalt velvet with a gold brocade top, and a Victorian brown velvet riding habit for my maid of honor sister.

    After my marriage, she often gave me money for clothes and was incredulous that I usually spent at least half of it on books. She shopped at Bonwit Teller while I went to Kmart. (My youngest sister still has to be reminded to look at price tags.) Didn’t I CARE how I looked? (Not enough, that’s for sure. And I needed a steady supply of expensive books.)

    For my second wedding she clearly thought things ought to be toned down – when she showed me the suit she was planning to wear I told her she would look like she was “going to the airport” and she laughed and laughed. She wore a chiffon summer dress instead.

    She did not like my adult writing and often acted like I was doing it to torture her – still playing “ripflesh”- although occasionally she admired a poem.

    She would have been a committed grandmother but cancer intervened. My sisters took her on a tour of the famous Sissinghurst Castle garden I couldn’t attend. She sent me a postcard of V. Sackville-West’s study that I keep in my study.

    She created many gorgeous homes (remodeling every kitchen); finally dying in a beautiful condo on the harbor in Rockport Maine filled with art books, silver, china, sculpture and paintings.

    She often scared me by warning me that I would certainly have the kind of upsetting daughter I had been; but the curse never came true. Instead, I had the daughter she wanted me to be; the perfect balance of beauty, mothering, intellect, professionalism, charm, religion, art, taste, culture and warmth, with a happy marriage thrown into the bargain.

    I think of her every day, and I still say “tomahtoes.”

  • Morocco 1961

    Jan. 15 – 1961 –
    Startling news. My father is going to quit his job and join the American Friends Service Committee! We are all going overseas to French West Africa to help the poor refugees who have nowhere to go. Tune in! We are having a party on the 20th and then we sell everything!

    Samedi Nov 4 1961- Dare El Baraka Oujda, Morocco
    I have decided a few times of my life to keep a diary for weeks, months, even a year. Again I am attempting it. I am reading about Marie Antoinette. Fascinating.
    School is a true horror hateful because I speak only enough French to carry on a poor conversation (hello, how are you, what is your name, etc.) M. Touati gets angry at me every day comparing me unfavorably to Carol Pixton who was apparently an angel. Just had singing class –think I grasped a few words.


    Sun. Nov 5 – 61
    Day is cold, crisp and clear – Mom and Dad and Avril went for a drive on the bled, Genevieve and Bill went for a ride on their bikes. (He is 24 and engaged. Not that it stops him making out with Genevieve every chance he gets. He can be a real pain – or a human being – sometimes.) I told him I intend to be an author someday and he both frustrated and flattered me saying I’d better “get something to write about”. I told him to climb a tree.


    Mon. Nov 6 – 61
    Back to school, very tired because I couldn’t sleep last night. Genevieve broke my doll on purpose and I hid in the garden while everyone searched for me. Asma my Algerian friend gave me a small box of licorice from the licorice seller who stands on a bloodstain right outside our gates (reputed to have murdered a little boy there.) Penny a box (5 francs).


    Turns out it is against the rules to eat in school. M. Touati said “Donne moi le boite.” (Asma said my lips were “noir”.) He asked if I was eating, I confessed, he asked Asma and she denied it (her lips were noir as well.) I wouldn’t satisfy him with a lie. I did my recitation, He said my pronunciation was terrible. (He speaks a little English. His pronunciation is terrible too.)


    Tues. Nov 7 – 61
    School sheer drudgery. I think longingly of death. I am still behind Carol. Mom says she had a French tutor all summer! That took a lift off my back. Genevieve and I bought the most delicious tarts at the Colombo Café – cherry chocolate cheesecake.


    Sun. Nov 12 – 61
    We usually take a trip on Sundays and Mom wanted to see the sea. (Mediterranean. Why, since the whole country is turning to sand?) Went to Cap de L’eau and had to ford a river –the Citroen has a special gear to raise it up. Neat. Rode on a ferryboat – Bill talked to the man in Arabic. Showing off. Cap de L’eau was not as spectacular as I’d been led to believe. It was windy and there was a dust storm. Bill offered to be a Seeing Eye dog and tried to push me off a cliff. Joking, he said.


    Mon. Nov 13 – 61
    Trudged back to school with crowds of children shouting “Romain!” at me (I think it means foreigner.) They put in the second grade hoping I’d learn something. I didn’t. Mr. Touati loaded us to our ears with homework. Took our guests to the Avril’s ballet recital (she was the only one not allowed to wear stage makeup courtesy Mom). Genevieve played flute with the Oujda Symphony. Sat way up in the balcony. It was wonderful!


    Tues Nov. 14 – 61
    School awful. I was hoping to recite my poem (learned all but one verse) but we had a science test which I did lousily on. No one did the homework.
    Dad took away my Agatha Christie and insisted I read The Forbidden Voyage about a family who sailed into the nuclear testing zone. It is interesting. One of our guests here at the Dar was aboard the Golden Rule, which was the same sort of boat.


    Fez – Thurs Nov 16 – 61
    Taken out of school in the afternoon (I had to go in the morning) so we could go to Fez! What a day! Car ride uneventful, arrived after dark. I changed from sailor hat and slacks to skirt and blouse at the hotel. I wanted to go back to the Hotel de la Paix after dinner but the family wanted to go to the Medina (in the middle of the night!) I said ‘I refuse” and stomped up the stairs. (I would rather read Wuthering Heights.) Genevieve came after me and said I’d got Mom in a frenzy. I said I didn’t care. (Did care.) Daddy came up to get me and led me sobbing down the stairs. Mom said she would stay in the hotel with me but I refused to ruin the trip for mother. They said Genevieve could stay. We smuggled tangerines and peanuts in our suitcase so we had a good night.


    Fez – Fri – Nov 17 – 61
    Coffee instead of chocolate for breakfast! Then we went to the Medina (by daylight) and saw everything including the mosque where we could hear them chant the Koran. (If you aren’t a Moslem you can’t go in.) They take off their shoes to keep the mosque clean.
    Vulgar street boys threw mud at us (Bill said they think we are French.) Went to the Palais de Fes (that’s how they spell it) and bought a few things. I got a knitted hat and a Moroccan purse. We had a good lunch (lamb) but had to wait a long time. Dad joked they had to go find a lamb. They brought us water to wash our hands at the table. I played with their cat and had to wash my hands again. But it was delicieux.


    Fez Saturday Nov 18 – 61
    Went to eighth century town Moulay Idis which was adorable and bought some pottery. Saw the outside of the Famous Tomb you can’t enter in if you are an unbeliever, also marks on the doors that mean someone has tuberculosis inside. We had to leave before dark – you can’t spend the night if you are a heretic so we went to Volubilis instead which is really beautiful a Roman ruin where I bought a lot of postcards. (I like the cranes building huge nests on the orange columns.)
    Dined again at the Nautilus – the hotel restaurant. I had steak and pommes frites, yogurt and sugar with oranges to take back to our room. Daddy gave Avril money to put into the blind beggar’s tin can.


    Fez to the Dar – Sun Nov 19 – 61
    A near perfect day. Genevieve gave me her peanuts to eat. Went to the Medina one last time – got a guide who looked like a hood. Visited the tanneries – the stench was unbelievable. I held my nose which Bill said was rude (he is colorblind and also no sense of smell. Almost as pathetic as the hotel beggar.)


    Tues. Nov 2 – 61
    School: horrid. M. Touati in a bad mood, tearing up people’s notebooks and slapping poor Belanger. Made him crouch beneath the teacher’s desk as punishment. Genevieve says they are forcing her to write with her right hand – don’t care that she’s been left-handed since birth.
    My cat Christopher has a girlfriend – the cook Embarka’s white cat. She is very pretty. He yells outside my window for extra food for her.

    Wed 22 Nov 61
M. Touati says bring 200 Fr so we can go to the circus. If you don’t bring them you can’t go.  I am bringing 200 for Asma. M. covered my paper about the beggar man with red marks because I looked up the verbs expressifs. I thought that’s what they wanted. I asked Mom aren’t we celebrating Thanksgiving?  Apparently not.  But Merrill is coming home from school in Switzerland for Christmas. She says she’s engaged. (She gets engaged every year.) Dad says never wear a bikini in front of your intended – they are Guaranteed to Lose Control.  But the NY Times writer’s wife wore the smallest bathing suit ever seen on a human person and Dad acted thrilled to see her.

Thurs Nov 23 – 61
We had a turkey after all! Mom said I asked in front of someone who wasn’t invited so that’s why she lied. There’s no figuring her out.

Past midnight 
The Spanish circus was wonderful.  There was a fat strong lady who lifted up eight people, some of them on an iron pole on her nose.  The tightrope walker Minni was everybody’s favorite but I liked the strong lady best. Minni had a man standing beneath her the whole time as if he could catch her when she fell! I guess they were just hoping it would kill him and only cripple her but luckily she didn’t fall. (We deduced he was her papadaddy.) The juggling was impossible!  They played American rock n roll in French! (“Ne racroche pas”.)  Mom and Bill shook their heads over the Americans spoiling Arab culture. I think their culture could use some spoiling since grown men chase little girls down the street if they have the nerve to wear Bermuda shorts.
Sun. Nov 27 – 61
Slept late – glorious day.  Fed Christopher – he is very jealous if I give the other cats attention.  He hates to be picked up (he never seems to hate me for attempting it) but he will allow petting. That’s OK, he used to be completely wild. I love his wild free heart. 
Mon Nov 28 – 61
Reading the Times – fallout, war, horror and death.  Why do these things have to happen in my generation?  I don’t hate anybody. I love the world and I don’t want to destroy it. 

Fri. Dec 3 - 61
Zoubida came with a little friend who spoke only Arabic and I entertained them.  All they wanted to do was eat green figs and knock berries off the tree. I went to get a ladder.  The berries were delicious; we divided them up equally. Majahead taught them how to make spears from bamboo.

Mom drove them home and they invited us in. They seemed rich to me (her father is a general) but served that mint tea so full of sugar you can stand a spoon.  You have to drink it or they are insulted. My sisters are running roughshod over me telling me to stop writing so they can turn off the light. A person can’t record their thoughts around here without being bullyragged. 
Today we had a student teacher,  Hopefully M. Touati is dead.  My birthday’s soon and they owe me $7. Good night!

Samedi 2 Dec 61
27 wrong in dictée.  Mr. Touati shook Carol Pixton is my face again.  That girl’s a blight. Poor Maurice Belanger under the teacher’s desk again. We had a singing contest at recess, singing in our own languages. The Arabic’s the best. 

Wed. Dec 6 - 61
Maria the Swiss nurse gave me a box of decorations for my party. Dad and Paul came home from their trip – Dad’s growing a beard – yuck!  I wore my red dress with the daisies. I got a Moroccan inlaid box with a necklace (which I’m wearing) the ragged bear from Warwick Castle. A copper bell from Rheims with the cathedral on the front and bath talc also.  Good naturedly conceited Genevieve gave me two of her old bras. First time I ever wore a bra. Avril watched me put it on.  Embarka made a wondrous cake and her famous fudge balls.  I was glowing.  Ideal afternoon at school. I came home and wrote eight letters.
At dinner Genevieve was so obnoxious I left the table without eating (all I wanted was cake.) Dad said no one should go near me I was “off the rails”.  Homework, homework, homework.

Thurs Dec 7 - 61
Today was generally miserable but maybe I’m exaggerating. Accidentally dropped Zackia’s pencil sharpener out the window. Feels funny wearing a bra! They tried to teach us Arabic in the afternoon! I’m having enough trouble with French! I think I’ll lead a revolt. M. le Directeur is sick with bowel trouble. Moroccan food is a shock. 

In the evening went to a Brahms concert. It was good. Afterwards Avril and I built a tent out of blankets and sweaters. One bathroom being fixed, the other generally in use so I went outside! 

Sun Dec 10 – 61
Took Zoubida rock climbing – she doesn’t get much exercise.  The countryside is beautiful.  Saw a lamb that had just been born.