Mirabel cinched me tight. “There!” The mirror exposed a stranger. I was a new person. “Too much dress” said Mirabel, “But with skyscraper shoes…” From the closet she threw out bundles.
“I’d rather wear flats,” I told her. She reproved: “Verne is very tall.” Who cares how tall HE is? “Bridesmaid shouldn’t tower over bride!” I suggested; Reining in the Clashing egos.
In weird familial telepathy Mirabel declaimed, “Princess Richenda To the Dark Tower came. Just like Tarot cards.” I admired my nude, mirrored Ribboned back. “But how about your dress?” “You’ve seen it.” Like breath went out of her – She tossed it out – they were identical.
How could that be? Wasn’t that too strange? I was gobsmacked – Never heard of bride and bridesmaid Wearing the same dress – Think of the confusing pictures – People getting entirely Wrong ideas.
“Isn’t that bad luck?” I questioned; “The groom will see the gown Before they’re hitched” – Ending Lamely, “If you believe That sort of thing.” I petered out because No one DOES believe that sort of thing. “My dress is size “zero” –“ Sniffed Mirabel –
Competitive, Combative Mirabel, and I was silenced. She knocked my phone right out of my hand – Sussing out my efforts to bring in troops – Mom would NEVER approve of this! “No pictures till the wedding.”
Her pressured speech rushed on – And on – “And now – we dress for dinner.” More fantasy clothes. I looked embarrassed at my Wrinkled skirt Discarded Carapace along the floor – shriveling Like my pride.
Mirabel threw open mirrored Doors to reveal another bedroom – This one stocked with girlish stuff. “This room is yours -” She told me – “He’s staying at The Stanhope.”
I blushed – I don’t know why – He’d called this residence “his” – But these closets were packed With Mirabel clothes so Where did I fit in? My sister unbound my dress –
I’m not used to Clothes that need assistants. There’s no getting out of these gowns Without help. “These are yours -”
Blue slits whose ruffles Matched my eyes – A dress with scales – Peekaboo and baby-doll Price tags proclaiming The less the dress the more the cost.
No bras here either – And everything my size. What was going on? Angrily I chose heels to tower over Mirabel – we’ll see who’s boss – But she didn’t seem to mind.
Her makeup kit delivered smoky eye, nude mouth and Emerald glitter. “Verne hates the kiss of Lipstick.” Who cares? These people kiss the air – I couldn’t Get the hang of this.
She wore cherry red chinoiserie – Now I’m impostor too. “He’s waiting at the Stanhope Bar.” We were silent in the elevator. I clutched the fur I’d borrowed Feeling naked –
Summoning up my nerve but Maribel seemed depressed. Deflated. Encumbered? With me? With Verne? With family obligation? Traditions I could Only guess at? I tried to play my role. “So… how did he propose?”
My query’s gaucheness seemed Amplified by elevator doors Whose golden mirror Bent our beauty so Unflatteringly we seemed Haunted.
“It’s not about when he proposed,” she Told me crisply, “but “When I accepted. He Proposed the first night we met – Five years ago – Said we’d marry – If he could get approval From his trustees.” Much to puzzle out in here! So trustees must propose to Mirabel?
O Bad New World that has Such creatures in it. “Five years ago? Was this a secret?” Why didn’t anyone – snoopy Richenda in fact – Find this out? “He hates the press – “ says Mirabel,
Whose explanations Don’t explain. “He Wants me to himself. And I was so unready – seeing other people…LOTS of other people.” Poor Verne! We nodded at the doorman, Safe beside the limo
I whispered, “How’d he win You over?” But Mirabel Did not seem to want to discuss This sacred aspect of their story. She dismissed me. “He was so adoring.”
She bundled me inside the car then Backed away confronted by a ghost. “I forgot something. Tell Verne I’ll be along.”
The car swept away, leaving Mirabel Huddled by the curb – overwhelmed by Her mink coat.
On Fifth Avenue; nonstop parade of glittery storefronts & Entitled shoppers.
Glamorous trousseau fun! . Our limo pulls up to Questrina, Sets off parking lights; A woman rushed through the double doors offering Glossy green dress bags in outstretched hands-
Driver swept them to the car and we were off again. “Your clothes,” explained Verne. Excitement, confusion; the Disappointment that Always follows bait and switch:
You get SOMETHING Just not what you expected. Had my dress been chosen for me? “I thought Maribel and I-“ “Oh, there’s lots for you to do,” He dismissed.
Surprised he didn’t offer Lollies to distract me. “Here we are,” says would-be groom. “My place.” A skyscraper on Fifth Avenue?
Shiny red and black doorman – general Of a third world country – Rushed the curb. “Your lordship.” I thought my ears unplugged. Had I heard this right? Did he speak American and was Verne in fact, “a lord”?
I should have watched those damned Downton Abbey episodes my folks begged me to see instead of proudly sequestering with Japanese anime. Limo driver brought all bags – He had to use a different elevator.
43 floor ride, black & gold enameled door thrown open on the penthouse there stood Mirabel.
Chapter Four : The Lost Sister
My eyes filled with tears and I realized How much I’d feared that This was all a scam. “Darling!”
She waved her skinny arms and kissed the air. “Mwah! Mwah! You escaped!” I couldn’t touch her – We laughed and laughed. She gave Verne a burning look – “Get us drinks”
And dragged me – Literally DRAGGED me into A double-doored bedroom and Swept me down upon a white flokati rug. We were children again – Conspiring & strategizing together or She played all the parts and I Gazed on adoringly.
She took control with those hypnotic eyes While my school self asked, IS this really Mirabel? So much smaller than my memory – Disappearing before my eyes in fact, As she had managed to do my whole entire Life; darker – blond all gone –
I know I’m taller now, but how could this tiny thing Have ever been a supermodel? Someone rattled at the door – Mirabel called – “We’re dressing!” Pulled me into giggle – “Leave it!”
Covered my mouth signalling with her Humongous eyes – Crawling to the door she – Peeked out – Pulled in a Champagne bucket and a pair of flutes.
“Grooms get in the WAY!” She laughed and toasted me. “But men! You know!” She gasped and gagged as if She’d never had such wine. I sipped sedately.
Judgingly As I’d learned to do with grown-ups. Who was this Mirabel? The way she carved me With her eyes She must be real Yet something smelled Imposture.
I just don’t know – I’m far too new – It’s far too weird. She leaned to touch my hair. “I always thought They should have named you Anne.”
The door opened and Verne stood over us Looking down reprovingly. Mirabel blanched – I thought because she’d said He’s not to enter – But he was mild enough
Laying dress bags along the bed Reproachfully As if to ask “How can you dress without dresses?” Then he was gone The door slightly left ajar. Mirabel clicked it closed with her foot. She called, “See you at dinner!”
I felt sorry for poor Verne But when we heard the outer door click Mirabel rose and unzipped the bags. She topped off her glass with Vodka from a bottle by the bed. “It’s such bad champagne,” she excused, “In Europe, babies drink this stuff.”
I studied the bottle – Beau Joie Brut Special Cuvée – A brute champagne. Tasted fine to me – like Sharpest winter air.
Mirabel offered her bottle. “No thanks.” She drained her tulip glass. ”You’ve certainly changed,” she commented. Did I drink vodka at eight years old? I said, “So have you.”
“I’m darker now. Verne wouldn’t look at blondes.” Too bad, I thought. I’d hoped she’d find a different type of guy. “Is he really a lord?” Maribel rolled her eyes. “Unfortunately.” At my surprise she added – “It always seems to mean you can’t do Anything you want.”
She shrugged. “At least the restaurants like it.” “And you’ll be –“ “Lady Verne.” She shrugged; unexcited By the prospect. Seemed The opposite of what Old Maribel would have thought.
“So, you just met?” “Oh no, we’ve been together FOREVER – And only now we tie the knot. But you!” She spun me all around. “You’re so tall! And thin!” “I eat like a horse” I apologized
I grow too fast – all my friends are vegan But I eat Everything – “I can’t seem to fast.” “Wait till after the wedding,” Said Maribel
“Then just do a purge. “Think you’d fit a four?” The dress she pulled was pale gold, fairytale dress with endless puffy skirt. My gasp relaxed Mirabel’s face. She smiled.
“I’m sure I could!” almost dropped my wineglass in my excitement to try it on. Stripped down to my unsightly sports bra And boy’s brief pants.
“Can’t wear a bra with this one,” says Mirabel. “I’ll do you up.” She gazed too long – A man’s gaze I thought – I turned away.
I followed all her modeling pages But there’s been nothing for the past Three years.
I was smart enough to know that airbrushed people don’t look like that in real life. Mirabel had been so gorgeous;
those huge eyes and perfect Roman nose seemed to promise a matching depth of soul. We all want to believe that beautiful people Get everything they need from life;
yet I remembered the Mirabel I’d known. She’d never come back to this family fold unless something had gone horribly wrong. As my train slid into the darkness of the Grand Central tunnel I texted the number I’d been given with “Train on time”
followed by a happiness emoji. Then of course I wanted to delete it But wasn’t I – as the only bridesmaid – Obligated to act excited? I’d never done any of this before – It’s Brave New World to me.
The response wasn’t from Mirabel at all but labelled @Valerian: “I’m meeting you. Mirabel otherwise occupied as usual. Look out for red hunting coat.” Who was Valerian? Where was Mirabel? Was this the fiancé who had her phone? If that was the deal from the beginning Mom and Dad would never let me come.
Here’s Mirabel at her core – proficient In the art of “softening people up” Which never meant the truth. Dad says Mirabel always “plays the inside straight” Some disparaging poker term.
As the train lurched to a stop I stood up and studied myself in the Mirrored windows. The girl “Valerian” would see Looked good enough in gray skirt with shiny thigh high patent leather boots and recently highlighted auburn hair. Nothing like Mirabel’s blond gorgeousness of course. But Out from beneath Mom’s thumb
I’d added to my eye makeup – Mom frowns on false lashes – Because looking ready for my moment gives me hope. I hadn’t answered the text: Stranger Danger just too strong. I’d Uber myself – if I knew where I was going. But I wanted the chance to Look at him before he looked
At me. That would work Unless He was the one who’d tried to Friend me – Meaning he’d seen all my pictures? Ugh. You want to be seen and yet somehow Not.
We project ourselves into others’ eyes – I want to be seen in a certain way – Where I control reactions! Of course it makes no sense And that’s what diaries are for – endlessly Trying to reshape Cellphone diary fantasy. But There he was
right by the escalators, standing out in his red coat. Mirabel would never descend to the tracks. A tall, distinguished looking man in his thirties probably, very thin – dark pants and a red down jacket. The closer I got the more Startlingly handsome was that weathered knife-planed face –
Beneath dark glasses – he broke into smiles at the sight of me. No hope of escape – If I thought anything it was – “He’s better than I dreamed!” Made it easier forging some new Relation with my uncomfortably lost sister. He reached for my bag
Kissed the top of my forehead Dry lips – tasting sweat and foundation. “Richenda?” English accent. “I Recognized you immediately. You look just like Mirabel. It’s the eyes.”
I felt a gush of pleasure at Such baseless flattery – Wanted to argue “I am not!” but Zines do say we girls must learn accepting compliments. Sooner rather than never. “Er, thanks.” So ungraceful.
“What happened to Mirabel?” “Unavoidably detained.” He swept both me and bag away from the escalator Down the platform. “We’ll take the elevator to the car service.” Actually, a limo. The driver rushed to take my pathetic flowered bag. Did the driver and this so far unintroduced man know each other – casually or permanent – hard to say.
“You’re the fiancé?” I stuttered out. He seemed surprised. “Sorry,” he said, bundling me into the limo, “It’s Wedding nerves. I’m Philip Valerian. Everyone calls me Verne.” I couldn’t stop laughing.
“Mom thought your name was Rupert Golden!” Verne didn’t find this amusing. “Some previous swain,” he huffed. Wedding nerves? Exactly right. He was jumpy, Fingers drumming on my knee. I was alone with @Valerian.
Fourteen and I used to be bored. Winter breaks were especially glacial
Till just recently –
Right before dinner Mom Put her head around my door : “You won’t believe what happened!” What could excite such A dull person?
But I lacked comparisons because This never happened before. Slammed my book shut because – Geometry is paralyzing – And joined the Guessing game.
“We won Powerball?” “Your sister’s coming home! To get married!” I hadn’t seen Mirabel –ten years older – in eight years. Truth to tell, I could barely remember her. A lifetime ago. “Why?”
Mom – never invited in – Leaned against the INSIDE Of my door. “Make up for the past.” Is that even possible? Or does she want a free wedding?
Mirabel was ALWAYS Always always always About the money. “So who’s she marrying?” “I think his name was something like Rupert Golden.”
“I didn’t want to ask her to wait while I got a pen. She said she’d send details. You know how she hates Snooping.” Everyone hates snooping, I thought.
Mirabel hates Accountability. Snooping can be fun If you’re the one doing it. Addictive. “Rupert Golden’s no real name,” was all I had To contribute. Mom gave me her “Like you’re the expert” face.
But fourteen year olds DO Know everything. We just forget Distracted so easily. We’ll be a whole family again for the first time in – ages.” So she can leave us again, I thought.
I knew. I’d always been Weirdly tuned from Mirabel “Murble” I called her When I learned to speak The dazzling goddess of my Dappled infancy.
Parents are nonsensical. All they cared was that She was willing to pretend for whatever short period that things are copacetic at the family manse.
Parents love pretending. “When’s this happening happening?’ “Unsettled,” said Mom. “She wants your help to buy a dress.” “Me?”
Up to that second I’d been a Peeper at The Family Drama. Did I want to participate? What choice did I have?
“You’ll be her only bridesmaid so she wants your dresses to match,” said Mom, But slowly as if just realizing What stupidity she spoke.
“You go up tomorrow night and the two of you come back Sunday.” How had she agreed to this? She still wasn’t happy.
“Unless… perhaps I’d drive you?” “I’ve taken trains before,” I said, trying to keep the baby whine Out of my voice. “I’m fourteen years old!” “But it’s the city,” wailed Mom
Panic flaring. “I’ve been to the city before, too,” I said. School field trips!!! Alone? First time for everything.
“She said she’d meet the five o’clock train,” sighed Mom, Obviously wondering How had she agreed to this? I almost didn’t like it.
So some strange woman Could call Mom up and Gain more freedom for me Than I’d ever managed?
It’s a gift. Don’t criticize its teeth. “It won’t be dark yet,” I said blithely.
“So is that where she’s living? In the city?” Rumors of international travel had reached us when Mirabel’s modeling cancelled. And all this time she’s Twenty miles away?
Mom seemed so unhappy. “I’m not sure,” she admitted. “Maybe it’s Rupert’s place. I’ll be trusting your good sense.”
She certainly can’t trust Mirabel, I thought. Someone in this family Needs to do some serious snooping.
That night someone named Philip Valerian Tried friending me on Facebook. I turned him down Like a bedspread, I Don’t talk to strangers.
Frustrated & mixed up. “Only a clear pool gives beautiful reflections”. (Says the Artist from The Cat That Went to Heaven. Fave book from childhood.) Shall I blame my period? I can’t imagine ever enrolling in any other school, EVER or jumping through hoops like these again.
Going to Tartuffe with Frank Edmunds; strictly as friends. (I paid for my own chicken. His French is very weak; I had to tell him “hors de combat” does NOT refer to prostitutes.) Rehearsing every spare moment for The American Dream – I’m Granny. Doing a “voice” – channeling my own Granny. But it’s not fun being someone else so I guess that proves I’m never an actress. Worry even in my sleep. Master Gwill gave me an A for To Bed In the Afternoon and said he will submit it to ProSem. I told him not to bother and sure enough, Toss Sheffield turned it down like a bedspread. Toss over to my table (with apologetic ice cream) to explain why. He wants “vignettes”. (Quelle “Belle Epoque!) He says the audience shouldn’t know how they’re supposed to feel. Much more artistic if they didn’t feel anything.)
He told me to start my own magazine! But he seems to be considering adopting me. That could lead to something. He’s got the most gorgeous long straight blond hair that makes me shiver. Good body, perfect nose. He has a brain. And he is a hermit. (Fingers crossed.) He says that he loves me and he hates me but refuses to elucidate. He came to sit at my table tonight and brought me ice cream.
Need to go to bed so I can worry. “Darkness, darkness, be my pillow…”
Wed 8 May 68 Starting to feel more happy & confident. It’s a shame I’m so dependent on men but don’t know if it’s fixable. Maybe it’s like a vitamin – got to have it or you get scurvy.
My father suggests I skip graduation and go to a Yugoslavian work camp! Five hundred dollars difference he says. Miss Senior Parties? So I only get the bad part of this place? I say No and No.
10:40 PM – Just learned the most horrible thing! Toss telling everyone I “tried to seduce him!!!” Writing an angry KOB right now. I invited him sailing and that is NOT tantamount to seduction in my universe!!! Telling him sailing invite is REVOKED!!
Casey asks what I’m writing and I say, “The truth.” She has forbidden me to discuss her with you ANY MORE.
“I’m going to write my own diary,” she grumbles. So I tell her to get on with it and stop her bellyaching! If people COULD, they WOULD. NoDoz to keep from sleeping when I ought to be studying.
Toss has gorgeous male body, which he sheathes in corduroy & sharp-starched French-cuff shirts. Wears an Eng tweed vest on ALL occasions. He knows the sight of him makes me throb. This is why I must be extra cruel.
Fri 31 May 68 Attempting to muffle my triumph while sitting in Fr after giving Front of Class rept on Duttilleul. Free at last, thank God I’m free at last!
Sheffield puzzles me to put it mildly. Invited him to work with me in the ice cream store but he sent Gary Long who is sweet & dumb & no threat to anyone. Then he shows up at the end to help me close. Tells me all about his father whom he deeply admires.
Isn’t father worship a good sign in a boy? Or not? He brought Casper the Grasper’s note about my “professional level” Granny. Best performance he’s seen at the school. Wonder if C realizes this is the same girl he stabbed almost to death with a rose pin years ago? Probably not – he’s totally gaga and at least 100. Sheffield says he talks to all the boys about masturbation.
Sun 2 June 68 “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now…”
Toss’ eighteenth birthday. I was his gift – he ate my throat and whispered through my hair and studied with the Engineering Marvel that is a push-up bra (he mispronounces as “brazier.”) Started off in the AM at the lakehouse. White clothed tables, Japanese lanterns, très chichi. T took me into the center of the lake on a canoe ride while I ate my breakfast. When it started to rain he took off his pink shirt. Oh my. Oh to scale the white cliffs of Sheffield…
Played tennis, sat together at lunch, collapsed side by side in a barley field. Then climbed to the treehouse in Boy Wood where he told me how beautiful my hands are and complimented my “lioness” hair. We undressed each other. Aaahhh… Roses for some very cold November. He shuddered over my breasts. His sweat is delicious. We licked each other clean of every childhood scrape & pain. I felt like crying from sheer happiness. This was the moment I’ve been looking for. I would have made love with him there & then but the Doberman did not drop the sirloin. Preston a terribly inferior lover compared to T…
He knelt at my feet to put on my shoes.
Only minutes left to dress for banquet – wore my short short SHORT hot Wore my Indian bells sundress with matching bikini. T. wore 3-piece suit and looked like turn of the century banking scion. Terrible speeches, badly planned. All on the subject of individual vs. society!!! Hard thing to toast.
The dance was VERY good. (Band tremendous.) Did a lot of sherbet eating and cookie consuming. (Shawn asked to dance once – very sporting I thought.)
Casey & Robt both sick in infirmary!
Sun 9 June 68 T really saved my senior year! I owe him so much! Casey & I rushed through our room like whirlwinds, packing! I dragged Avril in for “moral support”. Pool party at the Cocks’. “I thought you didn’t like parties,” I said to T. He said, “I want to be where you are.”
Changed into a dancing dress with huge flowing sleeves. 2 kinds of salad, French bread, fried chicken, chocolate cake saying CONGRATULATIONS CLASS OF 68. Security guard insisted T wear a tie – he put his belt around his neck. We lay in the same lounge chair. Paradise. This life is enough for me! Immortality would KILL me all over again! We danced & danced. I have enough. I am enough.
Clove Hill Conference Center Tues 11 June 68 Sprawled out in the Meditation section of the “Senescence Manor” Library; an obligatory “way station” on the way to Europe. They are training us how NOT to be Ugly Americans. I’m supposed to be “meditating” so here goes. Last night was so perfect. One of the happiest nights of my life.
After dinner Francie Parks, Matt R., Toss & I drive in Someone’s Father’s Car to coat & tie affair at the Bellamy’s. Everyone but Toss & me seek a quiet corner to smoke dope. Why waste this glorious evening? Plumly Survivors, Unite. Is this a boat in which we haphazardly drift together or a trap we fell short-sightedly into?
The latter, I guess because T & I flee as soon as possible to explore the grounds while a very good cover band plays “Shotgun” & “Hitchhike”.
I wore my blue gauze skirt and Very Tight Satin Vest that Doesn’t Need a Shirt (but Miss Womrath would say IT DID.) T. skirting control SEVERAL TIMES sobbing with apology & passion while the male bullfrogs shrieked, groaned & screamed. Toss liberated a whole quart of vanilla ice cream from the Bellamy freezer, which we polished off between us; then Eggs Benedict & sticky buns were served! We danced it off.
T’s parents arrived – I said goodbye to Casey who seemed happy enough with John M. Duke Droyer agreed to ride with us to the Sheffield party. T’s parents seem very young – Mrs Sheffield showing off her lime green shoes. Crowded into the back Toss strokes my stomach tenderly, whispers, “I love Alysse Aallyn” into my ear.
Toss’ house is a railroad magnate’s nooky little Bavarian castle set into the Pennsylvania countryside. Paintings everywhere by Toss’ father – who’s an undercover artist posing as an investment advisor. Fauve paintings – some very good. Mrs. Sheffield showed me to my puffily pink-quilted room – sharing with the absent Francie – but I wasn’t ready to sleep, especially since they had a pool. Swim!
Holding each other under water so exciting. We dried each other off and he gave me the tour, including the basements (which go on and on) where he has his darkroom and ending up at the Recently Acquired Matisse. That was where we took off our bathing suits and collapsed in a pile of cushions, wet hair and hot towels…just as Matt R and Francie P came in! Both acted like this is an everyday occurrence – we are graduates after all! What can they do to us now? Finally staggered off to bed.
Toss woke me at ten for breakfast (said he couldn’t wait any more) and I met his brother David (13). Toss’ mother seemed annoyed about something like she had forgotten we were there. T & I walked Duke to the leafy little train station. I kissed him goodbye – (who knows when I’ll see him again?) and Toss mentioned that – by the way the senior boys had unanimously voted me Girl Most Likely to Get Married First.
Compliment? I think it is if you realize it REALLY means “Girl Most Likely to be Proposed To.” T. didn’t know it but this poured balm on my still bubbling wounds inflicted by the Rumor Mill.
Thurs. 13 June 68 – JFK International Airport Plane late, but meal vouchers also delayed, so forced to buy myself cheeseburger & Danish with my coffee. Now that vouchers have arrived I’m not hungry so might as well waste it on bourbon & ginger ale! In spite of the glares of the white suited headwaiter. I have an excellent view of the takeoff fields.
So where had I got to? Steak with T & parents on their lawn? They look to me for clues to the Toss they’ve never met. But the more T’s dad likes me & tries to please the more onerous the Mom finds my presence! An exactly matched pair of counterweights! Will I look across a lawn someday at the girl who steals my son’s love from me?
I am very much aware that I was only given food & a place to sleep because I’m Current Choice of the Eldest Son.
Strange how people’s lives intertwine and they upset each other’s timetables. Alysse wants to go to Europe. Toss wants to go to Oregon.
Cruel twist of fate – everyone gets the thing they don’t want any more. We are governed by the shadows of our former selves.
Hungry after all – I eat Vichyssoise & cherrystone clams. (Excellent clams.) T. took me back to Pewter Hill by train because he doesn’t have his license. We went out for Chinese food with Genevieve and her husband (it was his 21st birthday) and G’s Plumly roommate Clarice. I would prefer to be alone with Toss – when we are around other people I always start to fear I’m making the whole thing up.
Toss missed his train (thank God) and spent the night. Played “sardines” – PH a very good house for that. I am the all time winner. Dad woke me & I woke Toss & ironed his shirt (pretty inefficiently I’m afraid.) Chinese eggs, (Dad calls it “slumgullion”) orange juice & coffee.
Toss rode on the train as far as he could go before he had to take a different connection. We kissed goodbye with people staring – I was suddenly shy.
These Clove Hill work campers are all cigarette smoking college types. I stood out like a sore thumb with my matching red luggage. The doctors refused to give my smallpox shot because of “oozing lesions” (poison ivy) wrote all over my passport instead.
We have to attend lectures, & choose a job. I chose “Gardening” my mother would be so proud – worked in the leek garden until my knees were black. Washed dishes after lunch, then washed my hair.
After the last conference of the evening, Toss called. It was a living pain to hear his voice. I said, “The hell with this – when’s the next train out of here?” He said, “I’m coming.”
We ran through backyards and over fences to his parents’ house. I said I’d like to quit the American Virginity Rat race. Went to the cabana (he says his mother is sick) and played John Wesley Hardin. Met his 15 yr old brother – taller but not as handsome.
Toss admitted he’s a virgin too, but “we’re not protected.” Is mutual masturbation making love? I don’t know how to make it satisfying – I am not there yet. He admitted I was there to his father who drove me back.
Awoke early to pack, grabbed a sandwich for breakfast. Our Icelandic flight cancelled (bomb threat) so we are flying Iberian.
Used graduation money to call Toss at 3:30. He is such a darling. Truly and magnificently humble (unjustly scorned word.) Owe him a 10-page letter. But –
Instead I wrote a poem:
LEAVING THE COVEN
A craven of cronies stood Between us & God – God hated short skirts, God Demanded clones.
A damnation of judges Stood between us & Knowledge; claimed truth exists in Servicing others.
A clowder of cretins Stood between us & Art: “Don’t be disturbing” “Never trust instincts.”
You escaped from The oubliette; rescuing me – So I could grow up And write you this poem.
Here’s the theatre where I serve my Indentured Seniors Project. Hem hem Mr. Green is late. I’ve forgotten how to sleep. It’s just not happening. Quit coffee, tried Sominex, nothing doing. Sitting in lobby of theatre school waiting for appointment. Wish I didn’t have to keep a journal the fathead faculty can read about my Theatre Experiences. I will write The Truth here and Dress it up later. Sitting next to me in an armchair is the best looking thing I’ve seen in a month of Sundays – peacenik with red gold hair & mustache named Dale Whitman.
Dylan Green strides in – receding hairline, round cheeks, hypnotic light eyes. Very attractive. Now watching them rehearse O’Casey’s Bedtime Story: Love it. I could watch rehearsals forever. Painting with people. Is that a job? Unfortunately actresses need to be seen and I wish I were invisible. How can one love fashion so much yet not want to be seen? Dr. Gilmour says I am an “enigma”. Green’s an excellent director; working on actors “mood”.
Love writing on trains. Things always look brighter. At Plumly dreaming & reflecting are criminal offenses. Must travel by train: crying for no reason in the car makes M & D think I’m psychotic.
Mon 25 Mar 68 Feel like a lonely drifter. $200 and go directly to jail. Trying to live exclusively in the present. Preston hot & cold, asks me to “give him more time.” That pisses me off just thinking about it; then he gets beggy. Don’t like him or me. He’s a placeholder. This is all my fault: I want subtle, skeptical doubting people and so that’s what I get! Ambivalent confusion. Think I’ll do my nails.
Tues. 26 Mar 68 Train to Radnor where I’m staying with the Carnahans while M & D & A cruise Virgin Islands. Hope I never arrive I like the journey so much. Carnahans very dull. Dislike her, have crush on him. She talks and talks – everything is Freudian. Any object you could grasp, touch or pick up is a penis; vaginas are negative space and no one thinks about them! He listens mournfully. Drinking.
Dancing class this AM at Southwark in leotard too big for me. Still it was fun. Release in a way, if they didn’t have so many mirrors and it was so painfully obvious I am the worst in the class. Guess my “lessons” with that hungry friend of Mom’s didn’t count.
Wanted to sit in on David Margulies’ rehearsal of Oresteia but Ron Reston made me sit in office & answer phones. Ron Bruncati asked me out to Art Museum show. I said OK. He’s bald and old enough to be my father but he is a director and its all grist.
And now for my emotional state – aha! Caught you with a bored expression. Bought a chocolate Easter egg at the station and now I’m going to eat it SLOWLY.
Wed 27 Mar 68 Ron Roston gave me some typing but Ellen Roston’s machine is broken so take an early lunch hour. (Use Sam’s machine when he’s done.) God what a year it’s been. God I would like to destroy this book. Just flipping through it is sheer psychological torture. But can’t destroy – probably for the same reason I’m compelled to finish all that’s on my plate.
Can’t write on the train any more: people are too fascinating. I want to ride in all directions as far as it goes. Just looking. (Is that a job?) Every stop would be a different story.
Bruncati picked me up ( not before I made date with interesting bearded character in acting class – Jack Foster.) Told me all about his boring Roman Catholic upbringing. He ordered alcohol for me – but they turned him down.
Yawned through art museum show – very dull except pen drawings. Pretty sure Bruncati realizes we’re no match. He was driving me up the hill to our house – amazed there was so much land in the middle of town asked, “Do you really live here or are you just trying to get me into the woods?” Har har. (He did not attack me.)
As soon as Avril gets back from Virgin Islands we’ll go see Tommy Steele in Half a Sixpence. (She will be so tan and I will be so jealous.) Reading Julie de Carneilhan – strange little masterpiece. Worship Colette.
The Carnahans pester me to take a cab at night but there’s never one there – I walk from station and no one’s raped me yet. Turn cartwheels and climb trees. I’ll see if they can take me home Sun night – my laundry’s becoming a menace.
April Fool’s Day – Mon 68 Reading Terminal crying my eyes out with everyone staring and that’s no joke. Want to crawl into a hot bath and die. Seems like I will never be much more than a squishy rag. Just opened my purse and NOTHING was there! No wallet, no ticket, no money, nothing!! I can’t WALK to Pewter Hill!!! Left my wallet locked up in Southwark office! Borrow dime from nice man to call home, of course no one’s there. Call the Coxes instead. Good old Theo hope he loves me.
Thurs 4 Apr 68 – Southwark Theatre School Dropped into Goody’s on the way here to pick up a Donovan record for Genevieve’s birthday. Easy day so far. I get to write rejection letters to amazingly accomplished actors pretending I’m Ron – including the lady from Gilligan’s Island. If this doesn’t discourage an aspiring actor, nothing will. Flirting with Dale Whitman – I love his hair. Wonder if he’s red gold & fuzzy all over. Preston walked in all young and ill at ease – I saw him through Dale’s eyes. Ouch! When he wants me I don’t want him and when I want him he doesn’t want me. Impasse. Dancing with Jack Foster last night – easy, happy guy. But he told me “Ball’s in your court” and I don’t like it there. He’s a doper, alas.
5 Apr Fri 68 – Train to Queen Lane
O Brave New World Meteorological Report: Looks like rain. Fashion Report: Looks like I’ve got a run in my stocking.
Importance of Being Earnest seen with Preston. A particularly bad Lady Bracknell. Preston desperately clutched my hand to the inside of his leg (wish he’d put his hand on MY leg occasionally.) He argues that polygamy is man’s natural state. Says “Look at dogs.” Told him to look at wolves, foxes (some birds). All news to him; which is bad news for his “progressive school”. Then off to the Electric Factory. Strobe lights. Pandora’s Box (they stank) & Electric Light Orchestra. (Good.) Preston and I tried getting into the same “leaning box” but a “security guard” jumps at us. What on earth is the point of the boxes then!!!
Preston angry at me because I wouldn’t let him come in at home. Good thing! Dad (just in from the Chesapeake) mixing daiquiris (gave me one!) and wanting to talk.
“You’re getting to be a big girl,” he says insultingly. I gave him my Big Girl on Daiquiris Smile. ( Daiquiris are good.) “How are you fixed for birth control?” Fatally uncool. I staggered. Recovered. “I’m still a virgin.” (In spite of them rather than because of them.) He skipped right over that. He said Dr. Rhodes could fit me with a diaphragm. I said, “I hear those interfere with sexual pleasure.”
He said, “No, no no. We’ve been using one for years.” Mom came in and to my surprise chimed in so this was a staged event. “You were born because of a diaphragm,” she said meaningfully. Dad said, “How about the loop? Looks like a question mark. You don’t want to be changing diapers at theatre school.”
That’ll never happen! If I couldn’t get an abortion I’d throw myself down the stairs. I said, “I think you have to have already had a kid to use those things. There’s always the pill.”
At this point Mom became predictably upset. She hates the pill because you don’t have to struggle with it. And if you don’t have to struggle with sex – then she bursts into tears. So I’ll never find out why sex needs to be a struggle. Dad admitted it was my date with 33-year-old Ron that blew the alarm.
Thurs 12:28 PM 11 Apr 68 Day of for Martin Luther King’s funeral. Watched it on TV. After 200 years looks like the rot is all the way through. Preston came over to invite me to see Paul Butterfield and Jesse Colin Young – too good to resist. Says he has been accepted at Haverford, Columbia & Chicago. Nice to have a future. Ended up wrestling on the floor. He got my shirt off but why do boys find bras such complex engineering problems That’s as far as we went. Watched the Academy Awards – Dustin Hoffman is a darling. (Listening to Tim Buckley. Will not be your Summer Princess or your Midnight Maiden. I will be your Sundown Angel.) Reading Madame Sarah. She was a big failure at the beginning of her career. Some comfort.
Read To Bed in the Afternoon to mom – she laughed the whole time. About child molestation and frigidity? I said, it’s not supposed to be a comedy – she said, “But it’s so funny!” A prophet is without honor, etc. etc. Time to shake the sand off my new, elegantly spurred leather boots.
Thurs 25 Apr 68 – Plumly Trying to learn a little self-reliance but it seems there’s nothing there. No wonder people take drugs. If there was a confidence pill I’d be seriously tempted. Unfortunately on alcohol I am only silly. Sweet loving letter from Devon who has decided to go into politics. I told him all the women would vote for him! He promised to invite me to Paris when he’s ambassador to France – I said it’s a deal. Lying in the sun reading Citizen Hearst.
9PM- relaxing in the Listening Room (no talking. My new favorite spot.) Handel’s Israel in Egypt. At least the music in this Institution for the Severely Disturbed is good. Catharsis! Feeling extremely good nose to grindstone finishing all my work.
Mom coming for Alumni Day – no Dad. She took me to the Cocked Hat to buy Lanz dress for prom. Long and white with thick lace cuffs, very pretty. Senior boys have banded together to “go stag – refusing old fashioned dating enslavement” so I was forced (pride) to import Preston. I’m sure he thinks I’m madly in love with him. I always want people to fall in love with me and when they do I am repulsed. But at least I can be polite.
Put aside Sybille Bedford’s Favorite of the Gods. Bland. Generation of messed up women. Now why would I want to read about THAT here in my prison cell??? Writing porn exotique under my current nom de plume Kathryn Klavier-Scott.
French Class – 11:l0 AM Tues 30 Apr 68 Finished test in 10 mins. Great letter from Merrill saying underneath my “blaze of emotions is a core of strength.” Reassuring. I love her so much. It’s hard not to worry about how false everything feels. I understand the boys’ fears, I really do, I don’t want to commit to something awful & irrevocable either. Old young, make female we are all at total cross-purposes with each other. Language fails us. Poetry? Art? Try to think of a way. Want to run through an art gallery in a nude leotard trailing a colored scarf. It could be my own work: enormously enlarged letters – fragments of “ransom notes” but you can’t tell where or when to make the “drop” so the precious thing is bound to die. (Saw it in a dream.) But I don’t want to go to Art school!!! (Not that they’d let me in anyway.) Then what? “Center down” as the old Quakers say.
Mom & Dad offer me trip to Europe for graduation if I work in a peacenik work project. Sent me a list of possibles. All the obviously, desperate starving places. But Sweden’s also on the list! I want to go to Ireland. (NOT on list.) Reading short stories of Sean O’Faolain.
Wish I didn’t have breasts. I don’t like them. They make me feel like Somebody’s Mother. I would prefer to be flat chested. No sex since JULY. Bought a bottle of New York champagne from Laura for $8 and locked it in my trunk. Not sure what I’m saving it for. Kate Moody signed me up for Operation Match. I got a list of 4 names and I told Casey “I’m going to get us a date. “ So I called the first name on the list – Craig Crawford, a U of Penn student with an apartment. So that’s good! He answered his phone! “Must be a loser if he’s home on Sat night” said the loser home on Sat night. He had company but told me not to worry, “I think she’s in the bathroom.”
He turned out to be absolutely charming, all American, ROTC. By no means a lost cause. Said he’d gone out with 2 girls through Operation Match and one of them spoke no English. I asked for a millionaire (Kate asked for me.)
I said, “Craig, will you be my millionaire?”
He said, “I want to be. Help me make my million.” Asked me out for Fri. I said sure if he can get a date for my friend. So – a reason for champagne.
Tues. 20 Feb 68 Mom came Sun night and took me & Casey out to dinner. Unfortunately she brought a Lame Duck Boarder – one of her “pretend children” some shockingly ugly girl she feels sorry for. I bewailed my barren existence. She told me I’m just “dissatisfied” not miserable. I told her about our date Fri night and she insisted Craig & Unknown Boy have dinner with the family! I told her Impossible. Not wanting to contradict her at dinner I called her up later and ruined it by crying. I SO want to be THERE and not HERE. She thinks I’m the worst spoiled child ever.
Paris Match said Bonnie & Clyde “encourages crime” and Pauline Kael said “those sawdust heads missed the point.” I like her.
1:15 AM Sun 25 Feb 68 The date was AWFUL. Just horribly, incredibly, irredeemably AWFUL. Craig was FAT (why didn’t Kate ask for someone thin?) and his friend was SHORT, with very glisteny wet slicked back hair. But still better looking than Craig.
The evening was so awful there’s no point in describing it. Shared a bottle of Almaden during a decent dinner (eggplant, mushrooms, chicken livers) but when the boys saw we were presentable all they wanted was to get us drunk. The only way this could have been worse would be if it all happened at Pewter Hill. Casey was no help – she’s been in that convent too long! She just went all glassy-eyed on me. The boys wanted to go to their apt and drink and she was all for it! I tried hard to talk them into The Electric Factory and thought I’d succeeded but they said, “Ha, we lied, we’re going to the apt.” Talked them into the Trauma – they stayed 10mins. So we ended up at their apt after all where Casey & Friend made out and danced while I parried pass after pass from Craig who finally gave us and lay with his head in my lap psychoanalyzing me. “You’re restless because you’ve never had roots.”
I had to call a cab before they agreed to take us home. Asked us to fraternity party Sat. Casey wants to go! (I talked her out of it later, thank God.)
We no sooner get home than Mom’s psychosis raises its ugly head, how starved and desperate I am so I will never get anyone good. That same woman who accused me of “going to meet boys” when I was trying to bike ride to Trevallion, who accused Merrill of “living in sin with Bill Saint” (they weren’t) and said Genevieve’s husband wasn’t “clean.” Just weird. So embarrassing with Casey there.
Then Dad came in and asked me “how’s school” like an uncle who hadn’t seen me for twelve years and I burst into tears. A mess all around. This dating stuff SHOULD be easy but its so not. You’d think Mom would be all for “Operation Match” – as long as people are honest it should work. (My advice: ask for a photo.) But no. It shows you want to date and that is evil.
Wed 28 Feb 68 Called Devon this evening – knew I shouldn’t have but I was so depressed. I’d invited Preston to the Mar 5 dance but he said he can’t go. Has to be in a play. Invited e to the play and asked me out for the 22nd instead. I agreed to that but it’s not The Dance. Called Devon to feel something – anything – he said he was glad I called and happy to speak to me. Thought I called to wish him happy birthday! (So I said I had.) He apologized for his letters said they were “written in moments of weakness.” I said they were very romantic. I felt better then, but worse after. He HAS a girlfriend (more than one) there is no point to this. Wrote a poem, Considering the Chill Factor. Hopeless couple who can’t connect.
CONSIDERING THE CHILL FACTOR Considering the chill factor As I always try to do The day was hot Too hot for love or war. We sit in restaurants. I pick The blue veined shrimp He picks the black-veined news. Outside drunkards Carom off the plexiglass like entertaining fish. “They envy us” and Andrew says “How nice.” I see a couple coming in; she holds him up As I so often upheld you. I know that touch surgeons who manipulate the dying. She wears my dress the one I wore the day you Shamed me Stuck me sizzling to the sidewalk Shamed us both with those red red stains. Andrew I don’t think I ever have forgiven you. Andrew says “How nice” he lays his coffee spoon upon the cloth I hate the brown stain it spreads like murder Like the bad smell of death Breeding fumes as we do Corpses in the sun. I rise to speak Shrimp spewing from my mouth like Parasites. “We have always been so happy, you and I.”
Mon 4 March 68 I’ve learned my lesson: when this huge book is used up I WILL GET A SMALL ONE. Gave up on March dance, called Preston and said I’d go to his play if he’ll go to the Electric Factory with me, Casey & Kip and champagne supper after at Pewter Hill. Mom likes Preston because his parents are her friends so she should behave herself. Rich parents used to give their sons peasant girls to practice the facts of life on and Mom is giving Preston to me. He has a nice bass voice, but something festers in his soul. I’m going to find it and poke at it. Mom wanted to invite Brice to dinner! I had to tell her the truth about him so she wouldn’t but if I thought I’d get points from her for spurning his dark desires I was wrong. Everything’s my fault because of clothes & personality. Past midnight – I write by flashlight. Casey talking in her sleep.
Hard to read Spark’s Mandelbaum Gate after Genet. Spark is trapped by her form, defeated by her subject and killed by her characters. Ho hum.
Casey & I started a film company – Gryphon Enterprises – to film my movie ideas. Marquis de Sade (of all people’s!) Eugenie de Franval is a terrific story (without the moralizing obviously) – also Donleavy’s Singular Man. Working on my scripts. Also wrote a short story – Odalisque – about a teenager robbing her own “Christina-esque” boat. Can’t use it for English because Master Gwill hates “plot” on principle. Gives the highest grades to character studies & mood pieces. For him I wrote To Bed In the Afternoon dialog of a frigid woman with her doctor. Sunday into the city to see Pinter’s The Lover – excellently done.
Tues 5 Mar 68 Benson builds a new philosophy in Defense of Homosexuality – happens to be my philosophy as well. One caveat: “the freedom of the subjective person to do as he pleases is overruled by the freedom of the responsible person to do as me must.” Who’s subjective and who’s responsible? For that matter, who’s free.
Benson knows he’s in enemy territory so he follows every argument to infinity: no loose ends. Do women take to lesbianism the way men take to homosexuality or are men just appalling lovers? Take Craig Crawford for example. #1 he’s hideous, #2 he WANTS to be drunk. Any rational sexy girl would start to look good if you’d had too much of that. At the moment I can’t imagine ever wanting to bear children but who knows maybe someday … At the moment 69ing sounds impossible. (Casey & I discuss.)
Merrill writes she “spontaneously aborted” after a month of pregnancy. Depressed her. I hastily replied that since all Aallyn girls are built to be Earth Mothers so she need have no fear. I can see my senior thesis needs to be a “book report: What’s Out There”. They will downgrade me for not expressing my view but they would downgrade me more if I did express it so Lesser of Two Evils…
Wed 6 Mar 68 Wonder if I can sit in a chair for auditions. Dr Gilmour says not. Don’t know what to do with this lump of a body of mine. I should be taking dance EACH DAY. What if I recite my poem?
Got a full weekend permission, there’s a wonder (before lowering of the financial boom.) I have overdrawn 3 times!!! Think of all the starving children in Asia and I spent $4 on a bottle of hair conditioner.
Like to think I am free from all the ridiculous dating taboos like “girls can’t call boys” so I phoned Preston. He’s an unpolished diamond – delighted to speak to me. He’s tall, intelligent, sensitive, thin, witty, friendly, etc. Plans to go to Harvard, run for everything & rule the world. So what if he doesn’t actually attend to this school? The less he knows of me the better, considering what people around here seem to think.
1 AM Sat 9 Mar 68 Twelve hours and my Wretched Audition will be over with. Numb with Dread. Chances very strongly that they will hate me, I will hate them, we will hate each other. I don’t see how I can stand any more rules. But everyone tells me I have to audition at Juilliard so audition at Juilliard I weakly do. Preston and I discussed it thoroughly fifteen mins ago. Nice to have someone to confide in. I impulsively invited him to the operetta and he impulsively accepted. Will he fear being Managed, like Shawn and chafe at it sorely? Insist on “spontaneity” while my calendar goes soggy from disuse? We’ll bomb that bridge when we come to it.
Thinking about Devon all afternoon. “So sweetly cold, so deadly fair!!!” (Byron) Really stupid. It’s like those chicks fixating on the first beak they see.
Plumly – Sun 10 Mar 68 “A character’s recognition, through the force of circumstance of the truth about himself is one of the classic themes of comedy” Walter Allen, NY Times Book Review.
Me at Juilliard. Get ready to laugh. I panicked at the institutionality of it all. Don’t want a building; was hoping for an ocean or a green field. Got through the audition but they’re going to hate me. John Housman told me to “pretend I was in the shower” and I froze. What the hell did THAT mean? Well, I didn’t figure it out. Should I strip? I sang instead which I’m fairly certain is NOT what he meant.
Depression not helped by Preston’s inept kisses, his damp limp hand throughout Guys & Dolls. Everyone envious of us as a “beautiful couple” but I couldn’t get him to apply pressure. Uh oh. This bodes ill, ill, ill for everything else. In memory Shawn tears apart my Lurex stockings to kiss my blue-veined legs.
I looked good I have to say. I wore a gorgeous white and silver glittery dress, white stockings and white six-strap heels. The most glorious part of the entire evening was fleeing this lousy institution in his father’s car instead of returning to my sex-starved roommate (same gender as me!)
We wander in the park at 1 AM in parka & boots over party wear. Steam rising out of the ground looked like Fall of the House of Usher. I climbed the rock wall to the art museum while Preston stared at me. Alas, he is no fun. A mad-haired spectacle was I. He says my nerves look like Francis Scott Key’s flag which is probably right. But I was NOT in the mood for psychoanalysis. Will I survive this place? Because it is winning.
Thinking about Devon all afternoon. “So sweetly cold, so deadly fair!!!” (Byron) Really stupid. It’s like those chicks fixating on the first beak they see.
“A character’s recognition, through the force of circumstance of the truth about himself is one of the classic themes of comedy” Walter Allen, NY Times Book Review.
That’s me at Juilliard. Get ready to laugh. I panicked at the institutionality of it all. Don’t want a building; was hoping for an ocean or a green field. Got through the audition but they’re going to hate me. John Housman told me to “pretend I was in the shower” and I froze. What the hell did THAT mean? Well, I didn’t figure it out. Should I strip? I sang instead which I’m fairly certain is NOT what he meant.
Depression not helped by Preston’s inept kisses, his damp limp hand throughout Guys & Dolls. Everyone envious of us as a “beautiful couple” but I couldn’t get him to apply pressure. Uh oh. This bodes ill, ill, ill for everything else. In memory Shawn tears apart my Lurex stockings to kiss my blue-veined legs.
I looked good I have to say. I wore a gorgeous white and silver glittery dress, white stockings and white six-strap heels. The most glorious part of the entire evening was fleeing this lousy institution in his father’s car instead of returning to my sex-starved roommate (same sex as me!)
We wander in the park at 1 AM in parka & boots over party wear. Steam rising out of the ground looked like Fall of the House of Usher. I climbed the rock wall to the art museum while Preston stared at me. Alas, he is no fun. A mad-haired spectacle was I. He says my nerves look like Francis Scott Key’s flag which is probably right. But I was NOT in the mood for psychoanalysis. Will I survive this place? Because it is winning.
Preston said he liked the sound of my dress. At least. He brought me the candy bar that used to be my favorite. It no longer is.
Tues 12 Mar 68 It is SNOWING outside. Final proof the world’s gone mad. Yesterday so spring-like Casey & I played tennis. Sat I lay in the lower field coated with Bain de Soleil! Vibrating like a wire over second mug of gray coffee.
Thurs. 14 Mar 68 Last day before vacances and I seem to have a fever. Sore throat ripped by endless scream, ears popping, the works. Getting out of class the only benefit. So no date for me. (Word for the day: Nacré. Means mother of pearl. Oh so beautiful. )
No date, but perhaps champagne. Casey and I looked at this enormous bottle (a magnum) and decided it was just what the doctor ordered. Invited Rob Severn (English exchange student) and Bob Burke (black eyebrows, long golden hair from Kenya or someplace) down to the Greenwood to drink it with us. They said they’d be delighted. Smuggled it in a Gimbels shopping bag. It was gone in about 10 mins! (Very grapey stuff.) Did make me feel better however. Unfortunately Burke threw me to the ground, tried to drag me to a shed and stuck his hand right up under my turtleneck. We are in the same weight class: I successfully fought him off.
Severn offered to show him how to behave, I said “please” and he kissed me beautifully. Very nice. I was regretfully forced to tell him I had probably given him typhoid but it was thoughtful of him to risk it. He invited Casey into the shed; she went. Burke said he would like typhoid too. I had to say no. I guess I am not as starved as I thought I was.
Pewter Hill – Sun. Midnight 17 Mar 68 Just read my diary for ’67 instead of writing my Special Project paper. Nauseating. What a boring idiotic little child I was. Pathetic. There is anguish associated with diaries and no mistake. This poor body is one raw nerve. Preston came over last night, I was too weak to make the first move so No Move Was Made. Shouldn’t there be SOMETHING between fighting for your life and fainting from boredom?
Saw his Yeomen of the Guard last night – Preston a very fetching spear-carrier. We saw Closely Watched Trains, came home, made coffee & hamburgers. I told him he didn’t miss anything with the champagne. Was a movie about a shy boy’s fear of impotence the best possible choice? (The best thing about it: Czechs don’t use extras, they use people.) Tried to discuss film (did not like it as much as Loves of a Blonde) but could hear Mom & Dad humping upstairs. Probably working on some kind of manual the doctor gave them. Thanks folks. Preston obviously embarrassed left early.
“We are but a moment’s sunlight fading in the grass…” Jesse Colin Young
Casey & I took a 2-hour walk past the Granolithic into the orchards and fields. Now I sit at my wobbly desk looking out of the window at a world warped by radiator fumes. Where will I be a year from now when some other poor wretch sits chained to this piece of lumber? Already I’ve escaped, imagining its spring and hot, and I’m wearing a short blue dress. It’s the tea party at Master Gwill’s after Hamlet (I played Gertrude) and Shawn and I are in love. Ah, memories.
McKenzie compliments me on my dress when I go into dinner – did I just buy it? God now, I said. I’ve had it 2 years.
Lucky you, she says, to have a closetful of beautiful clothes you never wear. I remember when you used to pull out eight things and ask me what to wear for Beales…
Shudder at THAT memory! Beales was constitutionally unpleasable. He used to get so angry! I now see that is a pathetic state of affairs.
Wed 24 Jan 68 Diaries are a horror. I could write and write and write and never get it all said. Plus I sometimes feel like a Current President forced to continue the policies of the Last President. Why can’ I be completely fresh & new? Original? Well, it wouldn’t be a diary, that’s why, it would just be a Notebook and guess what? I have plenty of those.
Diaries
I don’t remember anything I’m an amnesiac so I wrote it down Stuffed in my closet Among discarded ballgowns (smells much the same) utterly useless but too beautiful to throw away I only recall The act of writing An up and over downtime scrawl As I recall the surgeon Cutting at my face tugging splitting flesh he peeled the wastage out. I recall fierce Liftoff In the writing Too much dig is waste It’s only what remains that’s Valuable.
Three tests in my next three classes. I don’t have to worry about French – no matter how poorly I do everyone will always do worse – but History – “Manifest Destiny” – I have not studied at all.
Then there’s the outrage of philosophy where I have to pander to a lot of theories I can’t accept.
Contrary to Plato there is no actual “truth”. Some things are just truer than other things. It is truer that I am at Plumly than In Paris, for example. Also, meaning changes – a fact that bothered Plato but does not bother me in the least. I mean, of course.
Plato is deeply obnoxious. He says somewhere exists a “perfect” everything – a perfect cat for example – yet “beauty” is a matter of opinion. This makes my brain bubble. I suspect my perfect cat and Plato’s cat are different animals. My perfect cat would eat his perfect cat.
Don’t even get me started about math; the only part I respect are Imaginary Numbers. Socrates said it best: to hell with the universe.
Reading Huxley’s Point Counterpoint about which the only thing I like is its name. He falls into every literary trap there is; too many places, people, names. Everyone seems to want to write a Panorama of Modern Civilization. This is Tolstoy’s fault. Cakes & Ale made me gnash my teeth. Yesterday I finished Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (Shawn’s recommendation). Feel sorry for the guy; a brilliant boy suffering from over education. He seeks freedom, meaning and – women, who have to wear high heels while they make love. They HAVE to! Otherwise he’ll TANTRUM!
Dinner at Master Gwill’s. The boys are punishing me for what I “did” to Dan. Except for Ed, Chip & Martin. They are always nice. Unfortunately my efforts to become a Noble Savage fail. Can think about nothing but food & sex. Worked Miss Lissome over at coffee, disagreeing with everything she said.
Sat. 27 Jan 68 – Pewter Hill
Movie orgy! Casey and I awake to NO bells, NO workjobs, NO faculty screams of abuse. Instead, peace, classical music, fresh grapefruit, good coffee, English muffins. (At Plumly only seniors are allowed to have coffee. You wait for four years lusting in you heart and then when you get it you realize it’s AWFUL. But you’re too proud and exhausted to tell the others.)
Last night we saw The Graduate – true true true plus wild & romantic. (Dustin Hoffman dead ringer for Beales.) This afternoon How I Won the War with John Lennon. Then Casey wants to run around Rittenhouse Square Seeing and Being seen and I want to sit in a café and stare. I don’t get my identity back that fast, is all. “You always ruin my fun,” she pouts.
Mon 29 Jan 68
Listening to Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream Casey starts sobbing incoherently. She says she waits and waits but no one ever comes. I know what just what she means. Instead of protesting my fate I draw thirteen flowers on my upper thigh. Thirteen. “The thing of it is” – fine Pinteresque phrase – the thing of it is I should be DIETING but my only joy is food. Conundrum.
Trying to do my senior thesis on Sex Offenders (Kinsey) but they are the dullest people you can possibly imagine. (Psychopathia Sexualis way more interesting.) “6% attempted intromission”. Learned one good word: “pudenda”. “Dearest Theobald, the spring pudenda are in full flower! How I wish you could be here to see them!” Or possibly, “Pudenda Pottencrest felt a premonitory shiver as she crossed the threshold of the old house…”
Bertrand Russell says we need sex so we can concentrate on our studies but who listens to him? Insomnia. Ginger Man nauseatingly self-conscious. Tried Growing Up Absurd but Paul Goodman (author) told me it was only for boys because girls don’t have problems. News to me. He keeps wailing about advertising but in my view (judging from New York Times Mag & New Yorker) the ads are a lot more interesting (and subtler) than the articles.
Several interesting letters from Devon in one envelope. The first, “written in a moment of weakness” looks like he was drunk. He’s romantic, I’ll give him that, in an Elvira Madigan kind of way. Dad was furious that those two committed suicide. He said if you really loved somebody you’d do anything to keep them alive and I think I prefer his philosophy. For Devon everything is Hopeless. Hopeless, hopeless, hopeless. He is in search of Plato’s perfect mountain, perfect skis, perfect run, perfect physical conditioning and its nothing but failure, failure, failure. Cheery. Do I love him only because he’s beautiful? No, he’s intelligent, too. (Amherst.) But he’s TOO beautiful…I don’t need to pursue Plato’s Perfect Skier. Think I found him. But can a boy from an all-boy family and a girl from an all-girl family be friends? I think I want to love someone who knows nothing of my past. When I say, “I was such an ugly child,” I don’t want them chiming in, “You sure were.”
I won’t write back. (Tactics.)
Fri 2 Feb 68
Silenced. No library “privileges”. Can’t ask Miss Womrath for a favor, my parents for money or discuss “college plans” with Miss Liveright. This school stopped being “the school for me” long about my sophomore year but my parents refuse to hear it. If only Mom were more like Daddy – if I got expelled he would just accept it. How to rip the lid off all this fake coziness? Plumly hates artists (on principle! “Self indulgent!”) Well, they can mete out punishment (detention hall) but my mind is mine alone. Genevieve hated this place by the time she left (attacked me for believing the very things she spent freshman – sophomore year drilling into me!) but she wasn’t honest about it (and she got into Wellesley) so M & D think it was “a big success”. (At Wellesley she studied psych; calls M & D “schizophrenic”. But not to their faces.)
Just recovering from a long crying session (as you can probably tell.) Hate all my classes and slept through study hall. “We shouldn’t have all these warped people in charge of everything” says Casey. Amen, sister. Detention hall’s in the collecting room – no one can sleep in there. Rush hour at the Gare St Lazare.
Mon. 5 Feb 68 Pewter Hill Sunday lunch, Avril helping me learn Aston’s lobotomy speech. Acting like skiing, building from the inside out. Horrible cold bath – water-heating system not working (as usual which Mom the Masochist refuses to believe. “You need to let it run,” she says. Believe me I have let it run.) Marcel Marceau in town – we got to go. Some new pieces. Ran into Dr Gilmour on the way out, she said she was HOPING I would get to see this!!!
Called into Miss Womrath’s office for cutting Vespers. She says the Student of Yesteryear would Never Have Dreamed, etc. She just wants me to grovel, which she won’t get. I am appalled that this place is run by these strange inhuman beings. (Miss Beeston is senile but since she “only teaches French” they don’t care.) Boys are suspended for long hair and thirty years ago they were suspended for crew cuts!! Finished Avalon – everybody settled for less than they had dreamed of in their youth. And Quiet Flows the Don next.
Wed 7 Feb 68 Liked Pinter’s The Basement so much I want to make a movie of it. Such insane simplicity!
Sun 11 Feb 68 Casey was babysitting for Master Gwill – went over to watch Jean Claude Killy ski in the Olympics. Exciting! Le Superman! Everyone comparing him and Karl Schranz but I say there’s no comparison. Sat NYC trip! Everything that COULD go wrong yesterday, WENT. Unfortunately station wagon had no heat and my feet were freezing. 12 degrees outside!!! Refused to sit with Peter who called me an “incorrigible bitch”. (Like all shy boys once you finally get them talking you can’t get in a word edgewise.)
Toured the Met, saw all the Greek stuff and more medieval stuff than is good for me then met with the others for lunch. Bought two candy bars to beef up boxed lunch. Then the Ballet of Don Quixote. The plot is: Quixote & Panza watch everybody dance! I kid you not! Costumes pretty good, but bordering on Tyrolean as if extras wandered in from another show. Still, I’d go to the theatre every night if I could.
Vol I of “The Don” NOT making me want to plunge into Vol II. Prefer Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers (unreadable intro by Sartre. Turns out I am not an existentialist.)
Mon 12 Feb 68 2 Plumly students killed & 2 injured in bad accident on the turnpike yesterday – truck jumped the median. People I talked to are lying dead in a morgue someplace. First class was a “memorial” – we sat silent. I try to think holy thoughts — difficult looking right at the harpies on the facing bench.
11:20 PM Fifty pages into The Golden Bough. Don’t see how his logic operates. And it’s the source of my Bible Independent Study!!
Tues 13 Feb 1968 Third period study hall. Struggling with Bible. Do not believe in God or an afterlife but if I was blind would I disbelieve in the world others tell me is there? But religion I reject utterly.
Thurs 15 Feb 68 A typical Thurs morning meeting – exercise in amateur rebellion & spiritual emptiness. Girls Collection seated first. On Sundays we can sit co-ed, on Thursdays we are segregated. Casey and I sit together (illegally- you’re supposed to sit the way you came in.) I guess we’re supposed to be grateful we don’t have to kneel on peas on the frozen flagstones.
My “prosperity” Chinese medallion chain (probably not real gold) is in hundreds of knots so at least I have something interesting to occupy myself. (Usually I sleep). “No fingernails” I think disgustedly as I pick at the chain.
DeeDee shoots to her feet; she wants to talk about Vietnam; has to get it right out or she’ll be too nervous. (She’s against it.) Drone, drone. Tries to tie the Viet Cong and our Recent Dead in some kind of incomprehensible pretzel.
Deep silence follows. I finish the chain and put it on. Susie Thos ahead of me is pretending to be bent over in deep meditation but is secretly conversing with the girl next to her. People shuffle, sigh and scratch their necks.
Maggie Brown drawing a flower on her leg while the harridans seethe. Sarah Gould leaps to her feet. She is a “kook” and dates “kooks”. Rambling question (to God?) about how “making out is an expression of love and how can love ever be wrong?”
Miss Womrath tries to re-start her heart, discovers she doesn’t have one. I admire Sarah for laying herself open to attack. Also for her athletic body, which we are all, admiring. Somebody else stands up to distinguish between “kissing” and “making out.” Kissing good, making out bad. Lips good, hands worse.
Charity Dellabrook vaults to her feet. She was all happy this morning she says but she feels guilty about being happy around all these somber faces.
Fri 16 Feb 68 Finished Our Lady over breakfast; turning it over in my mind. I think it’s one of the most exciting books I’ve ever read for it insights into the creative brain. Honesty and originality are the only words for Genet. I neither thought these characters depraved nor pitied them. I’d call Maggie of Mill on the Floss more “perverted” than Divine. Readers deserve to be trusted (Pinter is expert at this.) So exciting makes me want to rush to the typewriter and work on “Dr Stavanger.”
I am doing a bunch of special projects – Harold Pinter, American Foreign Policy and Konrad Lorenz. Probably ought to be a way to blend these so I can write the same paper for each. How about a play about the Vietnam War performed by ducks?
Toiling on my poetry. Sneaking into the Tower at night to write poetry in black magic marker on the inside of the bathroom stalls. Something “cultural” to look at. (Mostly Millay and Frost but some John Lennon. Plus my Plumly poem sans attribution.) Krissy says everyone knows it’s me because my handwriting is so distinctive.
Verb-Corseted The French teacher sweeps The cherry blossoms from the tennis court (As she would like to sweep the cherries) French them soundly beneath Spiked shoes; printing red marks Like kisses On their half-grown thighs While headmistress Cello-breasted Measures with her thumb The Bath Wife’s heft; Polishes graffiti carved upon her Coffin in Chaucerian High English And the girls, Nun – white Nun – blue Soar above the soccer fields Foul-mouthed angels High on fetal wings; Anticipated ecstasy locked in narrow hope chests Ripened on amphetamines Free love Bad dreams.
1 Dec 67 Cheering letter from penpal Dell Rynehardt, the one who saw me at the Stratford play and asked for an introduction because I was so beautiful! Reading Territorial Imperative and On Aggression. Interesting. So glad to find a valid argument against the conditioned reflex.
Worry that I’m prostituting my mind in this place; Plumly Academy for Losers. My teachers may be well-meaning but they are trying to drag me down the wrong road. Their “good intentions” are dangerous for me. Reading Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil for my “non American novel”. Good to be a senior: these days I do nothing but read which is all I ever did anyway.
Nothing human is alien to me, says Terence. Doesn’t need to be human from my point of view. Fri. study hall, I’m in the library studying for test on the Constitution. Can’t wait for THAT to be over. Casey and I off to dinner at Pewter Hill.
Wed 6 Dec 67 Back at Plumly. Bad birthday – me, Mom & Avril all endlessly menstruating. Auntie Beulah creaking like a shutter in a gusty wind, probably jealous that she can’t menstruate too. I admired Mom’s bracelet and she took it off and handed it to me in an annoyed way! I don’t want it like that!
Now I’m so high strung and bitchy these days it’s a wonder anyone can stand me. I bite my nails, claw my face, pick my hair and my hands shake. I trip over furniture. How will I make it till June? Prognosis: grim. I was SO looking forward to that Pewter Hill dinner, then missed two buses trying to get back to school. Mom kind but irritated underneath; I shot myself to pieces with mental recriminations.
Received two bad shocks; first; Brice Harbreath will be along on our Christmas ski vacation. Ugh. His lewdness & diseased morality seep a constant vicious poison and since he talks a good line about “freedom vs license” M & D don’t realize it. It’s one of those things where you can’t expose him without making yourself look bad. I know he will cling to me like a limpet. Ugh! That laugh! I shiver at the thought. And he dumps ME for being “sexually inadequate” because I wouldn’t take it for granted that all dates should end with a hand job! Ugh, ugh, ugh. “Frigid,” my foot!
Second shock; Mom offered me skis for my birthday and I said I didn’t need them. But when I reconsidered and said I thought new skis would be nice she snapped at me that I don’t need them! I thought it was my choice but guess not! “We’ll rent,” says Mom, “Or you can borrow from Devon.”
Devon the ski coach! That would be great. Put me on the wrong track with him from the start; I was counting on him to protect me from Brice. Hell. The real joke is I’m the only member of this family who can actually ski! (Owing solely to Devon.)
Thurs. 7 Dec 67 Six girls received the same KOB last night – only difference is name printed in block letters on the outside. Inside in crayon: DOESN’T IT SEEM RATHER FOOLISH TO LET YOUR PRIDE BRING YOU DOWN?” One glance and I knew it was Shawn Kobler. Proved it to Casey from his writing sample in my notebook. Everyone else thinks it refers to the Christmas dance; the demand that the guys dress up, buy flowers and act decent. I think the others are camouflage and I am the real target. He has a point, but I’m not admitting it, because sometimes pride is all there is. Was dozing through meeting when Shawn spoke up at the end about how emotion embarrasses everyone. People worry about “self-revelation.” That was brave! But I’m not going to the dance without a date and just “meeting” him there. I would rather go with a guy I DON’T LIKE. So there.
Reading The Man Who Was Thursday, which should definitely be called The Man Who Was Sunday.
Wed. 13 Dec 1967 Ate like a wolf at dinner – like a COVEN of wolves. What is to be done? Flirt with Blair Manteo till I saw Shawn staring at me. Decided to send him an “anonymous KOB” saying “Doesn’t it seem rather foolish to send anonymous KOBs?” Serves him right. But he already confessed to Aynsley so it would be beating a dead boyfriend.
D & M in Vietnam and I’ve heard nothing for 2 weeks. I SUPPOSE they’re all right. Just read the most appalling Newsweek – all they get out of Dr Zhivago, Bonnie & Clyde and Darling is the cut of the clothes.
Casey studying by the window. We were caught for Late Lights so have to study downstairs in the Monkey Cage. Discomfort (no tea) but plenty of company. This is a very Disrespectful Senior Class. Either that or it is unrealistic to expect ANYBODY to finish ANYTHING by 10 PM. Off to Girls’ Locker (to pee) I trip over Bob Burke & Susie Thomas all over the floor (and all over each other.) There may be snow on the ground but it’s spring in our hearts!
On my way back I trip over Renda Swayne & Bill Johnson Doing the Likewise. It’s enough to drive one into the Girls’ Parlor to watch TV with the Uglies and the Morally Fucked Up Council Robots.
I know what I want for Christmas. Print of Breughel’s Hunters in the Snow. As soon as the bell rings Casey and I are making soup.
Tues. 19 Dec 67 – Pewter Hill Advanced state of 20th cent rot clearly observable on Johnny Carson show. I give up and come upstairs. Told Dad I’m thinking I want to be an actress but worry I’m not pretty enough. He says, “Judith Anderson is an actress!”
Have you SEEN Judith Anderson? I have – (MacBeth.) Suicide is preferable. Thanks a lot, Dad!
THINGS ACCOMPLISHED IN THE LAST 3 DAYS: 1) Read Helen Bevington’s When Found Make a Verse of 2) Taught Avril 3 French Christmas carols 3) Took Phinney on 20 walks, brushed him, cleaned up 900 messes 4) Washed every dish I could not talk my way out of 5) Slept & ate continuously
Something’s got to give!
Fri 29 Dec 67 just after midnight – Pinkham Notch NH Past, present & future all mingle. Driving home from a party with Devon Duvall – he keeps kissing my hands. Can’t kiss mouths because we are laughing too hard.
“Goddam it” I say and he says, “What kind of pillow talk is that?”
The kind you have with someone who already has a girlfriend. (or 6.)
Luckily skiing is good for sexual frustration.
Mon. 1 Jan 68 My sex life has nowhere to go but up. My dreams have been INCREDIBLE!! Writhe & pant all night. Reading Achilles His Armor in between doses of The Decline & Fall of Practically Everybody. Wonder if my life will ever be a joke someday to somebody. Left the New Year’s Eve party (Brice kept asking if I was a virgin); faced the fact there would be neither sex or champagne to be had; donned my golden caftan and cleaned my room.
Ever been climbing stairs and you suddenly noticed what your body was doing and you couldn’t do it anymore? That’s what happened to me at the mountaintop, feeling cold and tired and hungry and I thought, what if I suddenly forget how to ski? Devon says beginners have to be taught not to sit on their heels – now the new racing theory is to sit on your heels, so NOBODY knows how to ski. And I don’t like things that work only when you DON’T think about them.
Wed 3 Jan 68 1:10 AM Nietzsche was surely right when he said of all the treasures life unearths, self-knowledge is the last. I am nowhere near it. Find other people a whole lot easier to understand. Mother speaks of auditions and my liver freezes but I was the one who suggested it! Do I want to be endlessly “inspected”? Seems so repulsive. Plus I hate hassle and Plumly is working my last nerve. Do I want to bothered while laboriously constructing my house of cards? Imposserous. Maybe I should join the Peace Corps or lock myself in a room and Write a Novel.
Somerset Maugham says only a writer is truly free and this book shows me how it can be done. As soon as I touch it I’m flushed back into the maelstrom and lost again.
Philosophically I am closest to Hindu. (Dr. Gilmour says I’m a mystic.) That right there separates me hopelessly from Devon who was raised a Hysterical Christian so now has a bad case of Borderline Religious Disorder. He says I’m a Pantheist which is NOT technically true since I believe in the supernatural. Metaphysics are the ONLY physics I have time for.
According to everybody I project confidence, which shows how blind everybody is. Avril told me she sees me rich & famous and herself a housewife married to a 9-5er. (She’s only 13.) She insists she has no talent, which I told her is UTTER BUNK. It’s the other way around: anything seen that young is a flashing pan for sure. Thurber obviously can’t draw and Basil Rathbone obviously can’t act but look at them!
The challenge always is to deepen the imagination.
Plumly Home for Incurables Mon 8 Jan 68 School station wagon met me at Paoli and I was back in jail in time for Vespers. We all bow our heads and I pray to Sredni Vashtar The Magnificent . She answers my prayer; I get an excellent letter from Devon saying how much he misses me! This boy shows promise! And another from penpal Dave saying he can’t find anyone as beautiful as me. Heheheh. He sounds so lovelorn you’d never guess he hasn’t seen me for four years! What a nut! I’m just friendly, I’m not actually encouraging him. Let’s hope he’s not some kind of a serial killer. Help!
In my jail cell complete with high chipped blue walls, iron bedstead and junk bureau I write a story called A Very Private Invasion. Spent a lot of time on it but now I can’t show it to anyone or use it for anything. It’s a fantasy about Devon and me after he gets killed by an avalanche (Heheheh.) It’s always a mistake to cross us writers.
Reading Unicorn can’t figure out why they rave about Iris Murdoch so. Hackneyed plot. Horribly afraid “they” would tell me “That’s the point! Isn’t it a gas!” It’s a gothic so I suppose I should be pleased. Still, literary criticism feels like a moving target.
Sat next to Master Gwill in meeting but didn’t have anything to say to him after. He’s so weird. What is he? Man? Woman? Floating hair? God only knows. Miss Cluny telling the whole junior class how REVOLTED she is by the IDEA of sex! And she’s like twenty-five! Should we be under the instruction of these mentally disabled people?
Casey playing Francoise Hardy. The minute she went to the Tower to take a shower I put on good old honest Stones.
Tues. 9 Jan 68 Last Fr I slept from 7;30 to ll:15 AM! I was so tired I wrote “combinining” instead of “combining” on my poster! Slept through dinner and study hall – Casey covered for me with Wienand. Wienand unscary these days – she has troubles of her own. Senior class pretty certain she left Miss Womrath (who has a broken leg) stuck in the dumbwaiter behind Senior Stairs for an hour and a half. On purpose! As who would not, if given half a chance?
Have to finish my five posters and do some French sentences but bed still looks inviting – as inviting as Plumly sheets will ever be when you’ve forgotten to pick up your laundry two weeks in a row.
College boards an oppressive seal upon my future. Seems a grubby deal with the affluent race. Couldn’t I go to Geneva instead? You know, where there are snows, storms & sailboats? Blame my father for teaching me to be a noncooperator with life and blame Chocolates for Breakfast for teaching me to be a noncooperator with my dad. A little reading is a dangerous thing and a LOT of reading is profoundly liberating. Someday I will be dead and everything I touched and loved will be dead. What will college boards matter then? I’d rather have a boxed set of “Complete Works” so I’d better get started. I love the smell of ink.
Finished Huxley’s Crome Yellow. A charming antique.
Tues. 16 Jan 68 Rather afraid of Colette. She is praised for her “humanity” but her impassivity doesn’t seem especially “human” to me. So the “corpse” of society has maggots! According to her, all relations between the sexes a disaster. Where is the perfect love of Joseph for Sidonie, of Sidonie for baby Sidonie? In her memoirs Colette’s more honest. I guess sometimes life doesn’t satisfy us by being as horrible as it has a right to be. Some salmon make it up the stream.
Fatally shocked Mrs. Liveright by telling her I don’t want to take college boards because I only want to apply to theatre schools. Thought she’s die right there. Now I have to prepare auditions – ugh – 5 pieces in all, 3 contemp & 2 classical. Wonder if they’ll let me be a man in Pinter’s The Caretaker. I don’t think it matters what sex he is.
Lovely letter from Devon worrying about whether we are soulmates! He’s always certain he’s missing some bus or other. I love his letters. Sweet, but confounding.
Thurs 18 Jan 68 Still shuddering from the spell of Colette. Chained to her mother’s fireside she heard the horses coming for her down the echoing road…what is the mystery? What is the secret? I try to get at it by writing a story, Death of a Great Actress. She basically wastes her deathbed trying to please her audience with one last show. Can’t submit it to any class so showed it to Toss Sheffield editor of the lit mag, ProSem. He says No. Why not a Real story about Real things like cows in a field? Shows me horrible photos of bums & train tracks. Says that’s art. I’m aghast. Is he reacting to being kicked off the Religious Life committee for his suggestion that a school bus parked sideways at a drive-in would be a Religious Outing? (He says he’s had his best orgasms – so far – in a school bus. Yet maintains he is a virgin.) Curses be upon them; their little gods are blind. The sooner I blow this dive the better.
Casey & I going into King of Prussia to see Genevieve and shop on Saturday. I will wear my new fur hat & muff and buy a poster of The Rolling Stones. Anything to break the ennui. In the evening, the faculty play, Importance of Being Earnest. I tried to talk senior play committee into Strindberg’s Dream Play; Shawn voted me down! He is still angry about that dance in the marble tunnels under the school where the eyes of glass-caged birds stare us down. There I dared to dance with Blair: girls meant to be “strictly monogamous” here. (Boys are a different story.) Shawn says out loud I only want to be an actress so my “beauty” will be admired. Find a way to turn THAT into an insult! Casey comes in wet and panting from swimming, says her senior project’s been approved. Hope mine will be.
Sat 20 Jan 68 Give me the earth! Give me the world! Will there ever be a book in which I am born on the first page and die on the last? Where if I wanted to know what will happen to me I can just read ahead? Rattling back in the station wagon I was stupid with desire.
Writing by candlelight on my desk’s dark blue blotter. Need to get to bed by one – 45 mins. Loafed hideously through study hall – did manage to finish Nick & Alex. Tried Gertrude Lawrence’s autobio but she is just too stupid – plucked every hair of her eyebrows and said “Darling” all the time ugh. Turned to Princess but got only as far as the annulment chapter before I realized she is just not leveling with us. All this “Dr. M” stuff. Dr. Mabuse? Sometimes there are things we won’t even admit to ourselves (Nietzsche says our own treasure is the last we dig up.)
Poor Alexandra – what did she get for her icons and prayers? Rasputin! “Sunny” was married to “Bloody Nicholas”! We should neither envy nor condemn. Human beings are poor wet butterflies crawling along the grass, flapping useless wings in terror. Marie at least seemed to know she was a broodmare. Poor Marie, bruised by her cloth of silver corsets. Poor Grand Duchesses unprotected by their diamond armor… at least I have my privacy. Seems so precious now!
20 short days we move into Pewter Hill! Can’t wait to sit at my desk at the top of the house watching dusk creep across the park! If the air is pregnant with snow I will have all that I need for Perfect Happiness.
Sun 5 Nov 67 Quite a weekend. Saw Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back and Bonnie and Clyde the latter leading to a very unpleasant date with Vincent Plevins where he lay with his head in my lap for an hour and a half and sobbed about his childhood. I’m ashamed & horrified & planning to never mention it again – hoping he feels the same.
B & C is a work of art – Casey wept at the end – I controlled myself with Iron Will (I’m especially ugly when I cry.) Certainly puts the sting back into death. Warren Beatty forgot a couple times he wasn’t playing Splendor in the Grass but that woman who played Blanche was very good. Gnomish CW with his squirming mouth & elusive eyes. The film defies discussion. Violence turning people into animals. Master Gwill went on and on about guns being phallic symbols while I tried very hard not to listen.
Didn’t like the opening – just another naked dissatisfied blonde – but at least the love scenes were beautifully controlled. “Hollywood” was resisted. PM says no one will fall for “triumph over impotence” at the end. I’m not sure. Surely it represents their safety with each other rather than actual sex act. To me the most beautiful scene in the film is when Bonnie has “the blues” and Clyde puts his whole hand over her face. They need each other – love emanates from each desperate being.
None of us agreed on The Final Look. PM = “panic”. Jack B = “We’ve got to keep driving”. I think they said different things – Clyde = “it’s over” and Bonnie = “I’m here with you. We’ll die together.”
Master Gwill took us out for ice cream after the film but Jack couldn’t stop yammering. The Truth is SILENCE.
Fri play rehearsal was cancelled so I hitched a ride to Media Station with Lindles. After a brisk walk from the Queen Lane Station I arrived at the house at 5:45. Dad immediately shoved a glass of wine into my hand.
Matt Romer called me up – offered to drive me back and see Don’t Look Back. I really wanted to see it but Dan has taught me how miserable I can be with someone I don’t like. Still, Matt said a lot of kids were coming so I agreed. Hope Matt didn’t think I was avoiding him but I was. He asked why I was so silent: “Thinking about the movie.”
We were late getting back – had to call Casey to check me in. I’ve got to stop being honest and start to LIE she warns me. She is probably right since all I get for my honor is a pile of detens. James Cleland of Duke U in chapel for Vespers. He was adorable – he’s all for “individualizing” religion says they’re all the same anyway! He ruefully observed that the older you get the more you need it.
I think people over-estimate their own resiliency. B & C couldn’t see what they were getting into. We are never as free as we think we are. I used to not understand why people kill themselves when the world is so wonderful and you can always start over. But now I see it’s a question of the Rot – how far it has gotten. Once you have polluted your soul there may be no turning back.
Mon. 6 Nov 67 I tried to sleep. Finished Princess, checked a few references with N&A, then lay listening to the girls calling each other down the halls like lovebirds. The inner life of a private school. Closest to miserable depression today in quite awhile. My headache filed me with such agony my whole body shook. Recalling when M & D wouldn’t allow aspirin because “you don’t need to be all drugged up!” (They disapprove of throat drops also.)
Out on the courts my hands were beet red and would not hold a racket. Hit the ball your racket spins. Felt like an animal on a treadmill! Nasty tennis. Run around the courts – a bit better – back in my room for orange tea. Reading about the Trials of the Russian Aristocracy. They were a bunch of idiots who don’t know where money comes from, sad to say.
Tues. 7 Nov 67 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution! I was timer at hockey giving me the opportunity to write two letters while sitting hunched in a blanket. Not a bad job. Any job that allows writing is a good job. Also details of Eisenhower’s visit (he landed his helicopter on the lawn!) including movies seen & books read. Etc etc. Acquitted self of All Social Obligation.
(Toss Sheffield asked Eisenhower what’s a soldier to do when asked to fight in an unjust war? Ex-Pres waffled.)
How I wished that I’d brought YOU. You wouldn’t think an old paper notebook could affect one’s life so profoundly, would you? Yet you have. For example, I can’t write letters unless I haven’t written here! Not only do I hate repeating myself – I don’t know what I think until I see it written HERE. Maybe what I need is a piece of carbon paper…Note to Self…
I remember being jealous of people who did NOT keep diaries I felt like such a slave. Breathed a sigh of relief as the SS France sailed past the statue of Liberty – certain I’d made my last entry ever. The Morocco diaries require an Iron Stomach to reread. But I spoke too soon – I was addicted! I have reached the supreme peak of egoism: nothing happens unless I write it down.
Wed. 8 Nov 67 Things never work out the way they are planned! This eve I was going to get so much done. Wash hair & set, do homework and reading. Instead I waste time talking to people. Suddenly got the idea for short story called To Bed In the Afternoon about a frigid woman. I tried to write it all down – typewriter ribbon all screwed up. I give her grandfather Granny’s bedroom, which I can clearly see.
Matt Romer playing Husband #2 calls up to ask me to help him with his part. Put him off – grabbed Eva La Gallienne’s autobio put myself under the hairdryer and start to read. Awful. Dull in the Extreme. Mom & Dad off to NYC to see Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead the lucky devils. Nothing to show for 3 hrs but clean hair ad a foul temper. I could have worked on Christmas cards! When I break promises to myself I fear I am becoming flighty.
Miss Cluny gave me & Casey a pineapple that made our mouths bleed. Now I am struggling with the correspondence of Mrs Patrick Campbell & GB Shaw but I am having trouble keeping the 900 characters straight. They would rather scald their souls then open them to one another. Much fashionably empty Evelyn Waugh double-talk.
Sun 12 Nov 67 Getting upset over people. Hate to see Aynsley turning into a bigoted old lady but she is. At dorm meeting we all plead for unlimited late lights and faculty shoots it down every time. Aynsley sides with them! She snapped at me “You yourself have acted terrible after getting what you want” right in front of everyone! Uh oh! This is my roommate!
She told Casey she felt sorry for C if she roomed with me because I hadn’t “grown up.” Well I don’t plan to turn into Miss Womrath if that’s what growing up amounts to! I was just seething! Aynsley herself hasn’t an iota of personal discipline and always needs help to do her homework! (Which I don’t give her so she is constantly in Lindles’ or McKenzie’s rooms.)
Certain Sarah Lawrence won’t let her in Casey also is a slave to convention (she has nightmares about college entrance exams) – kowtowing frantically to the sadistic old women who run this place. Makes me burn to even TRY to please these old bags. But they won’t let me room by myself! Damn.
Tues 13 Nov 67 Senior Play went remarkably well (although my mother commented loudly that I had never held a broom in my life which is NOT TRUE.) Fun driving around Philly after though Far from the Madding Crowd no good. Terence Stamp couldn’t save it.
Today on the other hand was One of Those Days. Master Gwill insisted I rewrite my paper on The Lark misunderstanding every point I tried to make. (I thought it was funny to write my paper in the style of the play. He did not.) I don’t think I CAN write criticism. All his compliments were just sops to my disappointment. Had that awful, “I’m going to cry” feeling but I couldn’t get away from Master Gwill who kept stumbling after me still talking and making things worse.
Tried to excuse myself saying I’d had a rough day – more compliments emptier and emptier – God it was awful. He obviously thinks I’m a helpless birdbrain. I was 20 mins late to History but he gave me a note.
Everyone could tell I’d been crying! Awful. I am always morbidly ashamed and at war with myself after these outbursts. I guess I am insanely moody – one day all smiles and Tra la la the next deepest, darkest gloom. Guess I am too emotional to be a true intellectual. Maybe no creative person can look at reality in a dispassionate light. Why should we want to?
A journal such as this presents the ridiculous side of life much as I try to embroider & give it meaning. Success? Failure? Only I can solve this conundrum.
Thursday, 16 November 1967 Oh wherefore in my heart that was so hard hast thou these tender places made to come? (For Kip. From me, courtesy of Shakespeare.)
Senior Checkout in the New Gym. We stood around and bounced tennis balls while I thought, there must be more to life than this. Then we ran around the floor several times. If I had a scrap of honesty left in my being I would have walked out. But I’ve been too well indoctrinated. I gritted my teeth and thought, if I waited four years I can wait a half hour, but baby, mentally I’m already gone. In a Russian mood reading Clara Milich and Oblomov. Oblomov is delightful – the scenes between Zahar and his master make me laugh out loud.
Kip and I have been on a collision course for the past few months. We keep colliding, veering off, going to other people. I stopped answering Bloy’s letters so he wrote to the school to find out where I am! Then he wrote me a really angry letter. Then he sent me a picture of him and his girlfriend dressed up for a dance. She’s the exact opposite of me in every known human way, so you go figure it out. I’m ”off “ relationships right now.
Monday, 27 November 1967 English next period – quel nightmare. That is an all Herman Melville class – love him or leave him, with a teacher who does not allow a “careful disorderliness” about the enterprise.
Thanksgiving was wonderful. I gave thanks for my unorthodox family, my excellent education (I make up the deficits) my inquiring mind, interesting face and good figure. Avril and I went for a walk and locked ourselves out. I had to climb the rose trellis and get in the third-floor bathroom.
I decided to kill sentimentality and destroyed all my love-letters – even from Dan who wrote the best ones so far. Not Reed’s KOBs though – they’re not really about me but they’re too good on their own to destroy. I’m sure he didn’t even keep copies, just tossed them off in free verse.
I read the whole of To Die at Noone and Kip and Preston both “dropped in” to see what condition my condition was in – both unfortunately on the same night. So, it was duel a trois with neither of them wanting to be the first to leave and Kip talking about how he was going to Harvard early placement (wrestling scholarship) and trying to make Preston, who attends a high school so hopelessly progressive that they have no grades – feel bad.
Finally Kip had to go first because he had his father’s car (Preston takes train.) So I made out with Preston till about two in the morning as a kind of frustration-revenge-rage thing. He said he loved me and I liked hearing it, but I couldn’t honestly say it back. Reading Easty’s Method Acting. If I did things his way I’d go insane.
Alysse Aallyn 