In the spring of 1975 I quit my job as an administrative assistant to a group of Baltimore architects and gave myself an extended vacation in Maine. I was divorced and very frustrated with the dating scene in Baltimore which seemed oriented around married older career men and young, hopeful, not very smart women. My best friend who had hired me for the position was having an extended relationship with our married boss, which I saw as revolting. She got very excited about the “black pearls” he gave her and the vacations they took where he could show off her gorgeous youthful body and his hideous elderly one at sun-drenched locations.
I myself had an unhappy relationship with the unmarried art director (we actually lived together for awhile) which was obviously going nowhere and I was drinking too much. He got fired (not sure why) and his subsequent meltdown gave me a good excuse to get out of there.
My parents had just bought a house on Round the Mountain Road, Vinalhaven Island, that they hoped would allow them to live on the island year-round, our property on the shore being more of a “camp”. This house had water access, a boathouse, and a fantastic greenhouse off the dining room filled with spectacular camellias. Just after my parents bought it my father was surprised to be offered a job by Pennsylvania’s governor Milton Shapp to manage the finances of his presidential campaign. My parents rushed down to Washington where the action was and rented an amazing two bedroom, two bathroom apartment on the sixteenth floor of Veazey Towers overlooking Rock Creek Park.
Dad offered to pay me to winter in the Round the Mountain Road house and keep the camellias alive (which I successfully did, in spite of having no gardening aptitude whatsoever.) I set up my office in the greenhouse and wrote my first novel, Devlyn, surrounded by all the Victorian novels I had ever admired. I wanted to cash in on the trend and write a “gothic” novel, but the fun for me was, could I write a real Victorian novel? It was a treat to try. I had a great idea in the fact that one of my favorite authors Thomas Love Peacock, friend of Shelley and author of Nightmare Abbey, had actually adopted an impoverished village girl and treated her like a daughter. The question was, why? And what happened next?
I spent the winter writing it out and getting an agent. I had an abortive relationship with an unmarried local realtor who turned out to have extremely primitive relationship ideas (ugh) and I was offered a serious relationship by the handsomest man on the island, a real sweetie of a fisherman. But to stay, permanently on Vinalhaven Island! To be a fisherman’s wife! Couldn’t imagine it. Turned him down gracefully (we hadn’t even dated) and he went on to marry the prettiest and worst-behaved girl on the island who led him a nightmare dance of several years until their subsequent divorce and he’s now happily married to a career-woman divorcee (with children) who can’t believe her good fortune. This hothouse trap is what islands are like and I knew to stay away. One of my previous colleague architects (whom I really knew only in passing) drove all the way up from Baltimore and suffered an hour ferry ride to the island to visit me with romance on his mind. But he was married! So by spring I was more than ready to trade houses with Mom and Dad and move down to their apartment in Washington, D.C. and see if I could scare up an interesting job. (They had to leave when Milt Shapp’s finances went under investigation by the FBI.) My sister Avril left Wilmington College in Ohio for the summer and joined me.
I certainly knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to be office handmaid to a group of professional men offering low salaries and zero vacation. I considered working for an environmental group, selling art on commission in a gallery, and I tried out an employment agency whose offered jobs were never what they said they were. When I found a classified ad for go-go dancers I was intrigued. After all, I did have a background in dance, having studied at Martha Graham in NYC and the Philadelphia Academy of Dance and I loved dancing at clubs. Avril and I went to the agency to “audition” and met Deedee, its proprietor. The job was wearing bikinis and go-go boots and dancing for the troops at military installations around Washington. There were a lot of venues! Two “gigs” were possible a day – afternoon and evening – and they would be only an hour to two hours, shared with another dancer. Bet of all, you only worked when you wanted to! Avril couldn’t stomach the idea, (she took a job dispatching messengers) but I was willing to try it.
It certainly was an interesting experience! I drove everywhere, to bases, Navy Yards, officers’ clubs, hospitals and air stations. The men were extremely polite and sometimes tipped. I learned to navigate the Washington DC area, and even briefly dated a naval lieutenant I met at an officer’s club in Virginia. My free-wheeling Quaker/artistic/peacenik background clashed horribly with his career plans, however.
Most interesting were the other dancers. All of them were career dancers who combined occasional gigs for Deedee’s agency with dancing in local clubs. I soon discovered the clubs in Virginia were considered the best because the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms vigilantes enforced audience distance from the dancers, who stayed in the dressing room when not on stage. Stockings, pasties and g-string were the required outfit, and the money was better than anything Deedee could pay. Three dancers worked per hour, so a set was twenty minutes. Less driving, more money, and a physical workout. It sounded good to me! My sister and I rented a three bedroom house in Chevy Chase, I auditioned for the Ad Lib in Alexandria, Virginia and was hired by Gentleman Jim, the manager. That’s how I got started dancing.
In the spring of 1975 I quit my job as an administrative assistant to a group of Baltimore architects and gave myself an extended vacation in Maine. I was divorced and very frustrated with the dating scene in Baltimore which seemed oriented around married older career men and young, hopeful, not very smart women. My best friend who had hired me for the position was having an extended relationship with our married boss, which I saw as revolting. She got very excited about the “black pearls” he gave her and the vacations they took where he could show off her gorgeous youthful body and his hideous elderly one at sun-drenched locations.
I myself had an unhappy relationship with the unmarried art director (we actually lived together for awhile) which was obviously going nowhere and I was drinking too much. He got fired (not sure why) and his subsequent meltdown gave me a good excuse to get out of there.
My parents had just bought a house on Round the Mountain Road, Vinalhaven Island, that they hoped would allow them to live on the island year-round, our property on the shore being more of a “camp”. This house had water access, a boathouse, and a fantastic greenhouse off the dining room filled with spectacular camellias. Just after my parents bought it my father was surprised to be offered a job by Pennsylvania’s governor Milton Shapp to manage the finances of his presidential campaign. My parents rushed down to Washington where the action was and rented an amazing two bedroom, two bathroom apartment on the sixteenth floor of Veazey Towers overlooking Rock Creek Park.
Dad offered to pay me to winter in the Round the Mountain Road house and keep the camellias alive (which I successfully did, in spite of having no gardening aptitude whatsoever.) I set up my office in the greenhouse and wrote my first novel, Devlyn, surrounded by all the Victorian novels I had ever admired. I wanted to cash in on the trend and write a “gothic” novel, but the fun for me was, could I write a real Victorian novel? It was a treat to try. I had a great idea in the fact that one of my favorite authors Thomas Love Peacock, friend of Shelley and author of Nightmare Abbey, had actually adopted an impoverished village girl and treated her like a daughter. The question was, why? And what happened next?
I spent the winter writing it out and getting an agent. I had an abortive relationship with an unmarried local realtor who turned out to have extremely primitive relationship ideas (ugh) and I was offered a serious relationship by the handsomest man on the island, a real sweetie of a fisherman. But to stay, permanently on Vinalhaven Island! To be a fisherman’s wife! Couldn’t imagine it. Turned him down gracefully (we hadn’t even dated) and he went on to marry the prettiest and worst-behaved girl on the island who led him a nightmare dance of several years until their subsequent divorce and he’s now happily married to a career-woman divorcee (with children) who can’t believe her good fortune. This hothouse trap is what islands are like and I knew to stay away. One of my previous colleague architects (whom I really knew only in passing) drove all the way up from Baltimore and suffered an hour ferry ride to the island to visit me with romance on his mind. But he was married! So by spring I was more than ready to trade houses with Mom and Dad and move down to their apartment in Washington, D.C. and see if I could scare up an interesting job. (They had to leave when Milt Shapp’s finances went under investigation by the FBI.) My sister Avril left Wilmington College in Ohio for the summer and joined me.
I certainly knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to be office handmaid to a group of professional men offering low salaries and zero vacation. I considered working for an environmental group, selling art on commission in a gallery, and I tried out an employment agency whose offered jobs were never what they said they were. When I found a classified ad for go-go dancers I was intrigued. After all, I did have a background in dance, having studied at Martha Graham in NYC and the Philadelphia Academy of Dance and I loved dancing at clubs. Avril and I went to the agency to “audition” and met Deedee, its proprietor. The job was wearing bikinis and go-go boots and dancing for the troops at military installations around Washington. There were a lot of venues! Two “gigs” were possible a day – afternoon and evening – and they would be only an hour to two hours, shared with another dancer. Bet of all, you only worked when you wanted to! Avril couldn’t stomach the idea, (she took a job dispatching messengers) but I was willing to try it.
It certainly was an interesting experience! I drove everywhere, to bases, Navy Yards, officers’ clubs, hospitals and air stations. The men were extremely polite and sometimes tipped. I learned to navigate the Washington DC area, and even briefly dated a naval lieutenant I met at an officer’s club in Virginia. My free-wheeling Quaker/artistic/peacenik background clashed horribly with his career plans, however.
Most interesting were the other dancers. All of them were career dancers who combined occasional gigs for Deedee’s agency with dancing in local clubs. I soon discovered the clubs in Virginia were considered the best because the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms vigilantes enforced audience distance from the dancers, who stayed in the dressing room when not on stage. Stockings, pasties and g-string were the required outfit, and the money was better than anything Deedee could pay. Three dancers worked per hour, so a set was twenty minutes. Less driving, more money, and a physical workout. It sounded good to me! My sister and I rented a three bedroom house in Chevy Chase, I auditioned for the Ad Lib in Alexandria, Virginia and was hired by Gentleman Jim, the manager. That’s how I got started dancing.
I always wanted to be a writer but writing felt almost too intimate ever to be my career. Other people didn’t seem to like it when I told the truth and always tried pushing me in a different direction. I kept a diary from the time I was nine years old and journaling became necessary to iron out my thoughts, develop them and see who I was becoming. From an early age my stories and poems didn’t meet much family support. If it wasn’t humorous, my parents weren’t interested. My father acted offended. “You wouldn’t want me to say it’s good when it isn’t, right?” My mother laughed her way through my short story about child sexual abuse: (To Bed in the Afternoon) “Isn’t it a joke?” School was more helpful because English teachers typically recognized and encouraged my gift. Fellow students, not so much. The areas I wanted to explore – personality contradictions, alienation, disappointment – were deemed pointlessly anarchistic. I read a lot and particularly liked mysteries involving masterful re-interpretations of confusing and frightening events. I remember excitedly opening Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd recommended by a teacher but dropping it as soon as Goodman declared girls were not subject to any of the pressures he described. Idiot!
I was particularly frustrated at Plumly, my Quaker boarding school, which was reputed to be educationally advanced. Their slow crawl through the likes of Steinbeck, London and Melville threw me into full rebellion. I did not encounter a single memorable writer in the English syllabus there and lobbied unsuccessfully for the inclusion of at least some women writers (my paper on Francoise Sagan was frigidly received.) When I complained to my parents, they joked that maybe I’d be happier at Catholic military school. It seemed I was going to have to construct my own education. The nineteenth century proved a good place to start – blazing with impressive women writers – ultimately bearing fruit in my first novel, Devlyn.
My experience at Plumly was so bad I couldn’t imagine going straight to college but took a “gap year” flirting with acting and dance. Fame would be nice, but what I secretly hoped for was fulfilling and supportive romantic love. I was able to talk my parents into paying for an apt on West 56th Street in New York City where I enrolled at Circle in the Square Theatre School and the Martha Graham School of Dance. Even though I got the lead in the acting class play I thought I was horrible and I was never happy expressing other people’s ideas that I couldn’t agree with right when I was trying to figure out my own ideas. The most profound memory I have of that period was feeling people trying to control me and me not wanting to be controlled. But could freedom be found? My own background strongly suggested marriage was a place where I could flourish – once I found someone who loved me and believed in me couldn’t I let my husband worry about the money? That seemed to be something men naturally wanted to do, while my knowledge of Mom’s Chestnut Hill friends was of women living in artistic paradises created by their own hands. Sure looked good to me!
My first boyfriend after Plumly’s Toss was an actor named Armon Hyle. He was talented theatrically and deeply sensitive and artistic. I followed him to Lawrence University but persuaded him to transfer to Antioch in Maryland where I could study writing – and there I ran into my first husband, the multi-talented Bruce Burke.
Bruce was a musician and a writer and dripped with charm. In fact, my writing teacher far preferred his writing to mine although I was fairly certain she was really ensnared by his beauty, as most people were. I considered Bruce’s poetry “masculinist” (i.e. idiotic) and I stalwartly refused to be critiqued by him, or even by my writing teacher who kept trying to make me “write like The New Yorker.” (Later she hired me to ghostwrite a novel for her. It was called The Colors of Love if I remember right and we did ell it but I thought it was pretty ghastly dreck.) I was struggling to write a novel about adolescence that tried to expose the general craziness of non-conforming parents who want you to conform, but I kept tripping over the Problem of Sexuality and was getting nowhere. I also wrote awful (feminist) poetry attempting to skewer my fluctuating psychological and emotional states. My job at the time was as the only paid employee of a community theatre whose director was a predatory sexual harasser. My relationship with Bruce kept him in check. Bruce had a band, Bad Heart, which played all over Maryland and DC on the same bill with better known musicians like Emmylou Harris and Judy Collins. It was fun travelling to David’s concerts, getting to know musicians, roadies, groupies and especially his charming manager, Bubbles (who used to tell me, “Alysse, you need to get your gothic ass in gear.”)
Bruce was older; he’d been married and divorced, been to Vietnam, been to jail. When he asked me to marry him I was elated. Marriage was in particularly bad repute at the time, but I thought my parents might accept him, which they grudgingly did. Our fun wedding at the Quaker Meeting on Jan 1, 1972 was everything I wanted, except that the harmonium player couldn’t make it through the snowstorm, and afterwards we drove to Vermont to stay with one of his roadies at a ski chalet. Right away, Bruce and I clashed. What I thought would be a ski weekend was actually a drug weekend and I refused to participate. Bruce was irked. According to him, you HAVE to do what everybody wants to do. But I had spent my entire life resisting that!
So after the wedding I discovered that my husband was a man who simply said anything other people wanted to hear. I was completely unprepared for somebody like that; I had been taken in, like everyone else. He talked my father into investing in his band, he talked a friend into investing in his album, he never did any of the things he said he was going to do with the money, always leaving me to apologize (and grovel), picking up the pieces.
He wanted to be where the action was, but I wanted to live in the country where I could write my novel. Almost immediately after our marriage his mother died, and using their tiny inheritance, he and his brother bought a farm in Devil’s Elbow, New York where real estate was incredibly cheap. The peace and quiet was just what I had been looking for. I immediately plunged into a novel about a lesbian relationship (Flycatcher.) It was really about the relationship of a mother to an unacceptable daughter, and the mother’s search for a perfect daughter but it was painfully inchoate. In the meantime, Bruce was touring, taking drugs and being unfaithful because “that’s what everyone expects.”
Our marriage, his relationship with his brother and with his investors were all on the rocks, so we sold the farm and moved back to Maryland to complete our college degrees. I needed a job and I needed to get rid of Bruce – I told him he could have the rest of the house money if he would just split, which he happily did. He had some bridges in England he needed to burn.
It wasn’t till my parents offered a housesit in Maine that I was able to actually complete and sell a novel, but although it sold 100,000 copies (paperback) it didn’t provide the kind of money you could actually live on. Worse, the publishing connections I had made assumed I would write to specification, while I had a whole psyche left to explore! Once again, marriage (much happier this time) and children (who turned out to contain the secret of the meaning of life!) intervened.
I wasn’t able to work on my second novel until 2002. I had been studying true crime for the past decade, increasingly intrigued and absorbed: here were ready made, real plots that explicated the very questions of identity, self-presentation, power, truth will and justice that had always obsessed me. With Find Courtney, I was off and running – and to my intense artistic satisfaction, Woman Into Wolf, Depraved Heart and I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead quickly followed with fabulous reviews. Unimpressive sales led me back to the theatre, where one forges a more immediate connection with the audience. With every play, The Honey & The Pang (Emily Dickinson), Queen of Swords (murderous stepmother), Cuck’d (Othello), Caving (quantum physics), Rough Sleep (the multiverse), The Dalingridge Horror (Virginia Woolf) I find out more and more about myself and the world I’m living in. Writing full-time to please yourself is the greatest joy there is.
Famously, my father was a conscientious objector. He wrote all about it in his book, Not By Might. He grew up in a home where his mother had divested herself of the religion she was born with by becoming a member of the Church of the New Jerusalem, a follower of the writings of mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg.
My father needed to work to contribute to his college education and so matriculated at 5 year Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, just south of Cleveland where he grew up. It was a “Society of Friends” school, so this was his introduction to Quakerism, and it came just in the nick of time, 1937; the run-up to World War II. He always talked reverently about the classes of Professor Mukherjee, who proved to his complete satisfaction that there could not possibly be a God. This freed my father from the oppressively militaristic and jingoistic attitudes of his origin family. He was incredulous that I, forty years later, wanted to attend a Catholic college and study mysticism. He liked that Quakerism didn’t insist followers agree on a creed; what dogma they had he applauded. To him it seemed stupid to solve diplomatic problems with threats of violence and soldiers. He completely embraced Gandhi’s theory of “ahimsa” – greeting abuse with reasoning and peaceful resistance. In fact he, my mother and a few college friends moved into a broken-down family farm, renamed it Ahimsa Farm, and made a good-faith attempt at communal farming.
When it became time for him to register for the war he announced he was a conscientious objector. The draft board, accusing him of cowardice for not wanting to go to Europe and be killed, sent him to Federal prison at Ashland, Kentucky. He was very afraid his first night there, but he soon made friends with the wide array of conscientious objectors of all faiths. Both my mother and father’s families were appalled and used every manipulation from shaming to shunning to talk him out of it. Unsuccessfully. He was finally sent to work in a Friends’ ambulance unit in China, and that experience gave him troves of stories we listened to wide-eyed as children.
We were very proud of our father but what he couldn’t seem to understand was that by giving me a model of conscientious objection he was also giving me a template to resist him. I’m afraid I drove him crazy! My first objection was to the Quaker boarding school they sent me to (and refused to allow me to leave) which I saw as a nest of the exact same hidebound theocratic hypocrites he had fled from. My second objection was to all the peace demonstrations he (and our Quaker school) wanted me to march in. I didn’t reject social justice per se, but I was annoyed by “group think” and enraged and insulted by the Quaker attitude to art as “self-indulgent”, “hedonistic”, “morbid” and “depraved.”
Needless to say, my work has been one shock after another as far as they were concerned. They were convinced I was doing it just to upset them, whereas I was trying to understand my own life and “Life” in general in the fine, independent tradition he had laid down for me! When I locked him out of my room he broke down the door: I threw my typewriter at him! Mom read my diary and listened in on my calls – behavior they usually condemned but felt forced to resort to by my unruly adolescence.
I did manage to graduate from Plumly (I couldn’t WAIT to get out of there) but I certainly didn’t want to go to college which I feared would be more of the same compulsion and obligation. Mom and Dad didn’t help their case by endlessly razzing my older sister Merrill about any interest she had in boys and the interest they inevitably showed in her. Ugh! I decided to go to acting school instead and be discovered. At Circle in the Square in New York City I found out pretty fast that I didn’t want to be an actor. I hated mouthing other people’s lines and was too full of my own ideas. But I did meet an actor there who needed to go back to Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin to avoid the draft and so I went with him.
There I discovered I was an intellectual! This was a fact Plumly had completely concealed from me through its endless harangues against art and sexuality. I discovered the letters of Elizabeth Gaskell, the diaries of Dorothy Wordsworth, and the wonderful controversies of Shelley scholarship. I studied Russian magical realism and Tillich theology and wanted more.
Unfortunately, one thing Plumly and my upbringing did give me was a smug sense of political and cultural superiority. My boyfriend’s father was the editor of the Scientific American and his grandmother lived in a 13 room apartment on Park Avenue in New York City but I treated him (and probably his entire family) as pathetically benighted. Every objection either of us had to Lawrence University and Appleton Wisconsin could be solved, I insisted, by transferring to Antioch College! Finally, I was throwing my poor parents a bone. My father as very gratified. We transferred to Antioch’s Columbia, MD campus where everything was “experimental”. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, it turned out there were no grades and we had to teach the classes ourselves, a fact which outraged my father. (He was paying for this!) I taught a class on women writers and my boyfriend had to travel long distances to secure an acting coach. We split up; I found a new boyfriend who wasn’t averse to marriage (he had been married before.) I saw this as another bone for Mom and Dad, although they acted less than thrilled, even after I told them this guy had been hauled out of Vietnam in military handcuffs. (He was given a dishonorable discharge which I considered a badge of honor.) Still, grumbling, they went ahead with a Quaker wedding. This “solved” nothing; me and my new husband soon had problems up to our eyeballs. After two years after moving, house buying and selling, we were on the rocks and I was working in Baltimore for a group of architects to pay the bills.
My parents and I had many more clashes over the years; mostly on taste issues since we agreed politically, but there were sadly few opportunities for Principled Conscientious Objection. (Sigh.) I must say I miss them!
Most people considered my mother not just the nicest, the most beautiful, but the most cultivated person they had ever met. She said “tomahtoes”, giving many words their English pronunciation; she floated through my childhood in a haze of elegant gardening, French cuisine (she made her own mayonnaise) and general gorgeousness. She had the famous “Marilyn Monroe” dress, sheer white with pleats and v-shaped neckline that she wore to parties with her arty hammered silver hand-and-feet earrings and necklace. She was tall, narrow-hipped and full-breasted, used no makeup except lipstick and she looked like a movie star in old slacks and a Mexican shirt. Grown-up people gazed at her adoringly, and as a child, it was hard to get her attention. It was, however, fairly easy to make her cry. We four sisters played a game my father called “ripflesh” which was basically torture. It was “Lord of the Flies” with girls.
The sport of Ripflesh was forbidden, making “the Queen” cry was forbidden, and Dad informed us that any promises we extracted from the Queen outside his presence need not be honored.
Mom was an “early education” specialist, so we had a playroom, a costume trunk, a full collection of puppets and all the Newberry Award-winning children’s books. I wrote my own children’s book based on Harold and the Purple Crayon; Poor Left-Out Harry – which much impressed my parents. They sent it around to their friends and we never got it back. Mom and Dad went to local art galleries and hauled home big modern art paintings by local artists. She enrolled us in modern dance classes taught by Dad’s business partner’s second wife, who wore a pencil through her ponytail and looked like a Feiffer drawing. Our Christmas tree was decorated with Mexican pierced tin ornaments and the modern house with the huge picture windows built to Mom’s specifications had heated polished cement floors.
She was dismissive of the exciting and sentimental TV, vulgar movies and comics we enjoyed but she did promote Classic Comics, which were my first introduction to Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson. I went on to read and enjoy the books. Visits to museums gave me a fondness for Egyptian art which she fed. She bought me all the Narnia books which I read one after the other.
Mom used to lock us out of the house so she could have “Quiet Time”. She would tell us to go play in the local arboretum, a haunt of pedophiles and up-to-no-good teenage boys. Luckily we were usually in a group. I was attacked and de-pantsed only once, but managed to get away. When I needed to be alone I climbed a tree. When she wanted us home Mom would yodel fearlessly out the back door. You could hear her for blocks.
On trips to Europe my mother clutched the Michelin guide and insisted we see the sights. They were usually well worth seeing. My mother and I bonded over medieval, Byzantine and Mannerist art which nobody else in our family liked but which woke me up to a lot of religious and artistic possibilities. We both had a taste for strongly stylized representation. I began to see the echoes of ancient art in modern art; and to be excited by the progression of ideas, experiments and languages. I wrote my own ancient Greek play (Chrysothemis).
As I became a teenager our tastes diverged. My mother loved beautiful clothes and often had hers tailored and hand-made at considerable expense. She visited China in the days of Mao’s mandated blue uniform and everyone gasped at and wanted to touch her bright pink raincoat. I have a pink raincoat now, in her memory. She ruled out polka dots (I love polka dots) and considered pink and black colors should never be in the same room. (I love pink with black.) She almost never liked my teenage fast fashion, but right before graduation she took me to the local ritzy dress shop Jane Chalfant’s, and bought me a white Walter Lanz graduation dress (they had to be white) and two op-art sundresses with matching bikinis for Senior Parties. She dismissed the outrageous cost, confiding to me, “It’s nice to be rich,” something my father would never publicly admit.
When I became a dancer she was particularly appalled, and not in the least mollified by my “Colette Was A Nudie Dancer” bumper sticker (she didn’t like Colette, either.)
We shopped for my wedding dress together on the Philadelphia Main Line but we were both disgusted by the mishmash of sentiment and glitz at bridal shops. (I said it was like buying a casket to inter yourself in.) We found a shop in Bryn Mawr we both liked that sold copies of antique wedding dresses – Ann Pakadrooni’s. I bought a gorgeous puffy-sleeved Edwardian dress of silk moiré with inset lace medallions. We also found her mother-of-the-bride dress, cobalt velvet with a gold brocade top, and a Victorian brown velvet riding habit for my maid of honor sister.
After my marriage, she often gave me money for clothes and was incredulous that I usually spent at least half of it on books. She shopped at Bonwit Teller while I went to Kmart. (My youngest sister still has to be reminded to look at price tags.) Didn’t I CARE how I looked? (Not enough, that’s for sure. And I needed a steady supply of expensive books.)
For my second wedding she clearly thought things ought to be toned down – when she showed me the suit she was planning to wear I told her she would look like she was “going to the airport” and she laughed and laughed. She wore a chiffon summer dress instead.
She did not like my adult writing and often acted like I was doing it to torture her – still playing “ripflesh”- although occasionally she admired a poem.
She would have been a committed grandmother but cancer intervened. My sisters took her on a tour of the famous Sissinghurst Castle garden I couldn’t attend. She sent me a postcard of V. Sackville-West’s study that I keep in my study.
She created many gorgeous homes (remodeling every kitchen); finally dying in a beautiful condo on the harbor in Rockport Maine filled with art books, silver, china, sculpture and paintings.
She often scared me by warning me that I would certainly have the kind of upsetting daughter I had been; but the curse never came true. Instead, I had the daughter she wanted me to be; the perfect balance of beauty, mothering, intellect, professionalism, charm, religion, art, taste, culture and warmth, with a happy marriage thrown into the bargain.
I think of her every day, and I still say “tomahtoes.”
Jan. 15 – 1961 – Startling news. My father is going to quit his job and join the American Friends Service Committee! We are all going overseas to French West Africa to help the poor refugees who have nowhere to go. Tune in! We are having a party on the 20th and then we sell everything!
Samedi Nov 4 1961- Dare El Baraka Oujda, Morocco I have decided a few times of my life to keep a diary for weeks, months, even a year. Again I am attempting it. I am reading about Marie Antoinette. Fascinating. School is a true horror hateful because I speak only enough French to carry on a poor conversation (hello, how are you, what is your name, etc.) M. Touati gets angry at me every day comparing me unfavorably to Carol Pixton who was apparently an angel. Just had singing class –think I grasped a few words.
Sun. Nov 5 – 61 Day is cold, crisp and clear – Mom and Dad and Avril went for a drive on the bled, Genevieve and Bill went for a ride on their bikes. (He is 24 and engaged. Not that it stops him making out with Genevieve every chance he gets. He can be a real pain – or a human being – sometimes.) I told him I intend to be an author someday and he both frustrated and flattered me saying I’d better “get something to write about”. I told him to climb a tree.
Mon. Nov 6 – 61 Back to school, very tired because I couldn’t sleep last night. Genevieve broke my doll on purpose and I hid in the garden while everyone searched for me. Asma my Algerian friend gave me a small box of licorice from the licorice seller who stands on a bloodstain right outside our gates (reputed to have murdered a little boy there.) Penny a box (5 francs).
Turns out it is against the rules to eat in school. M. Touati said “Donne moi le boite.” (Asma said my lips were “noir”.) He asked if I was eating, I confessed, he asked Asma and she denied it (her lips were noir as well.) I wouldn’t satisfy him with a lie. I did my recitation, He said my pronunciation was terrible. (He speaks a little English. His pronunciation is terrible too.)
Tues. Nov 7 – 61 School sheer drudgery. I think longingly of death. I am still behind Carol. Mom says she had a French tutor all summer! That took a lift off my back. Genevieve and I bought the most delicious tarts at the Colombo Café – cherry chocolate cheesecake.
Sun. Nov 12 – 61 We usually take a trip on Sundays and Mom wanted to see the sea. (Mediterranean. Why, since the whole country is turning to sand?) Went to Cap de L’eau and had to ford a river –the Citroen has a special gear to raise it up. Neat. Rode on a ferryboat – Bill talked to the man in Arabic. Showing off. Cap de L’eau was not as spectacular as I’d been led to believe. It was windy and there was a dust storm. Bill offered to be a Seeing Eye dog and tried to push me off a cliff. Joking, he said.
Mon. Nov 13 – 61 Trudged back to school with crowds of children shouting “Romain!” at me (I think it means foreigner.) They put in the second grade hoping I’d learn something. I didn’t. Mr. Touati loaded us to our ears with homework. Took our guests to the Avril’s ballet recital (she was the only one not allowed to wear stage makeup courtesy Mom). Genevieve played flute with the Oujda Symphony. Sat way up in the balcony. It was wonderful!
Tues Nov. 14 – 61 School awful. I was hoping to recite my poem (learned all but one verse) but we had a science test which I did lousily on. No one did the homework. Dad took away my Agatha Christie and insisted I read The Forbidden Voyage about a family who sailed into the nuclear testing zone. It is interesting. One of our guests here at the Dar was aboard the Golden Rule, which was the same sort of boat.
Fez – Thurs Nov 16 – 61 Taken out of school in the afternoon (I had to go in the morning) so we could go to Fez! What a day! Car ride uneventful, arrived after dark. I changed from sailor hat and slacks to skirt and blouse at the hotel. I wanted to go back to the Hotel de la Paix after dinner but the family wanted to go to the Medina (in the middle of the night!) I said ‘I refuse” and stomped up the stairs. (I would rather read Wuthering Heights.) Genevieve came after me and said I’d got Mom in a frenzy. I said I didn’t care. (Did care.) Daddy came up to get me and led me sobbing down the stairs. Mom said she would stay in the hotel with me but I refused to ruin the trip for mother. They said Genevieve could stay. We smuggled tangerines and peanuts in our suitcase so we had a good night.
Fez – Fri – Nov 17 – 61 Coffee instead of chocolate for breakfast! Then we went to the Medina (by daylight) and saw everything including the mosque where we could hear them chant the Koran. (If you aren’t a Moslem you can’t go in.) They take off their shoes to keep the mosque clean. Vulgar street boys threw mud at us (Bill said they think we are French.) Went to the Palais de Fes (that’s how they spell it) and bought a few things. I got a knitted hat and a Moroccan purse. We had a good lunch (lamb) but had to wait a long time. Dad joked they had to go find a lamb. They brought us water to wash our hands at the table. I played with their cat and had to wash my hands again. But it was delicieux.
Fez Saturday Nov 18 – 61 Went to eighth century town Moulay Idis which was adorable and bought some pottery. Saw the outside of the Famous Tomb you can’t enter in if you are an unbeliever, also marks on the doors that mean someone has tuberculosis inside. We had to leave before dark – you can’t spend the night if you are a heretic so we went to Volubilis instead which is really beautiful a Roman ruin where I bought a lot of postcards. (I like the cranes building huge nests on the orange columns.) Dined again at the Nautilus – the hotel restaurant. I had steak and pommes frites, yogurt and sugar with oranges to take back to our room. Daddy gave Avril money to put into the blind beggar’s tin can.
Fez to the Dar – Sun Nov 19 – 61 A near perfect day. Genevieve gave me her peanuts to eat. Went to the Medina one last time – got a guide who looked like a hood. Visited the tanneries – the stench was unbelievable. I held my nose which Bill said was rude (he is colorblind and also no sense of smell. Almost as pathetic as the hotel beggar.)
Tues. Nov 2 – 61 School: horrid. M. Touati in a bad mood, tearing up people’s notebooks and slapping poor Belanger. Made him crouch beneath the teacher’s desk as punishment. Genevieve says they are forcing her to write with her right hand – don’t care that she’s been left-handed since birth. My cat Christopher has a girlfriend – the cook Embarka’s white cat. She is very pretty. He yells outside my window for extra food for her.
Wed 22 Nov 61
M. Touati says bring 200 Fr so we can go to the circus. If you don’t bring them you can’t go. I am bringing 200 for Asma. M. covered my paper about the beggar man with red marks because I looked up the verbs expressifs. I thought that’s what they wanted. I asked Mom aren’t we celebrating Thanksgiving? Apparently not. But Merrill is coming home from school in Switzerland for Christmas. She says she’s engaged. (She gets engaged every year.) Dad says never wear a bikini in front of your intended – they are Guaranteed to Lose Control. But the NY Times writer’s wife wore the smallest bathing suit ever seen on a human person and Dad acted thrilled to see her.
Thurs Nov 23 – 61
We had a turkey after all! Mom said I asked in front of someone who wasn’t invited so that’s why she lied. There’s no figuring her out.
Past midnight
The Spanish circus was wonderful. There was a fat strong lady who lifted up eight people, some of them on an iron pole on her nose. The tightrope walker Minni was everybody’s favorite but I liked the strong lady best. Minni had a man standing beneath her the whole time as if he could catch her when she fell! I guess they were just hoping it would kill him and only cripple her but luckily she didn’t fall. (We deduced he was her papadaddy.) The juggling was impossible! They played American rock n roll in French! (“Ne racroche pas”.) Mom and Bill shook their heads over the Americans spoiling Arab culture. I think their culture could use some spoiling since grown men chase little girls down the street if they have the nerve to wear Bermuda shorts.
Sun. Nov 27 – 61
Slept late – glorious day. Fed Christopher – he is very jealous if I give the other cats attention. He hates to be picked up (he never seems to hate me for attempting it) but he will allow petting. That’s OK, he used to be completely wild. I love his wild free heart.
Mon Nov 28 – 61
Reading the Times – fallout, war, horror and death. Why do these things have to happen in my generation? I don’t hate anybody. I love the world and I don’t want to destroy it.
Fri. Dec 3 - 61
Zoubida came with a little friend who spoke only Arabic and I entertained them. All they wanted to do was eat green figs and knock berries off the tree. I went to get a ladder. The berries were delicious; we divided them up equally. Majahead taught them how to make spears from bamboo.
Mom drove them home and they invited us in. They seemed rich to me (her father is a general) but served that mint tea so full of sugar you can stand a spoon. You have to drink it or they are insulted. My sisters are running roughshod over me telling me to stop writing so they can turn off the light. A person can’t record their thoughts around here without being bullyragged.
Today we had a student teacher, Hopefully M. Touati is dead. My birthday’s soon and they owe me $7. Good night!
Samedi 2 Dec 61
27 wrong in dictée. Mr. Touati shook Carol Pixton is my face again. That girl’s a blight. Poor Maurice Belanger under the teacher’s desk again. We had a singing contest at recess, singing in our own languages. The Arabic’s the best.
Wed. Dec 6 - 61
Maria the Swiss nurse gave me a box of decorations for my party. Dad and Paul came home from their trip – Dad’s growing a beard – yuck! I wore my red dress with the daisies. I got a Moroccan inlaid box with a necklace (which I’m wearing) the ragged bear from Warwick Castle. A copper bell from Rheims with the cathedral on the front and bath talc also. Good naturedly conceited Genevieve gave me two of her old bras. First time I ever wore a bra. Avril watched me put it on. Embarka made a wondrous cake and her famous fudge balls. I was glowing. Ideal afternoon at school. I came home and wrote eight letters.
At dinner Genevieve was so obnoxious I left the table without eating (all I wanted was cake.) Dad said no one should go near me I was “off the rails”. Homework, homework, homework.
Thurs Dec 7 - 61
Today was generally miserable but maybe I’m exaggerating. Accidentally dropped Zackia’s pencil sharpener out the window. Feels funny wearing a bra! They tried to teach us Arabic in the afternoon! I’m having enough trouble with French! I think I’ll lead a revolt. M. le Directeur is sick with bowel trouble. Moroccan food is a shock.
In the evening went to a Brahms concert. It was good. Afterwards Avril and I built a tent out of blankets and sweaters. One bathroom being fixed, the other generally in use so I went outside!
Sun Dec 10 – 61
Took Zoubida rock climbing – she doesn’t get much exercise. The countryside is beautiful. Saw a lamb that had just been born.
(Lectern flanked by flowers. A screen with a glamour pic of a young man in his late 20’s- wistful, engaging – someone you’d have liked to know. A young woman, mid twenties, dressed for a funeral in a very tight fitting suit, steps up on the stage and picks up the mike with a becomingly abashed air of charm & professional sweetness)
MARCI Hi, I’m Marci, and I’d like to say a few words about Glenn Godiver. I never saw myself as a person who gives eulogies, but Glenn and I had that kind of relationship. We called it The Mutual Autopsy Society. You do me and I do you.
(She acknowledges audience laughter)
Right? He was so funny! Sometime it took me like a minute to get the joke!
(Trying to be serious.)
If you knew Glenn, you were one of the very, very privileged few. He was a private guy, and although he had more friends than anyone I’ve ever met, he didn’t let just anybody in. But he was SO worth knowing! I mean, what a guy! Am I right? Every guy wanted to be Glenn Godiver and every girl wanted to get with Glenn. At least that’s what he would say!
(Laughs)
Naw, you couldn’t stay mad at that guy. At least I couldn’t. What a sweetie pie! He was as sweet as pie.
(Tries to chuck the photo under its chin. Presses a button on a remote and the pictures change to Marci & Glenn together or with groups of young people. Traveling, partying.)
There he is, right where he always wanted to be, the center of attention. He wouldn’t leave while the party was still going on! When I was going through my pictures I can’t tell you how many I found where there I was on the sofa asleep, waiting for Glenn to feel ready to go home. There’s one! Because while we were dating those six happy, happy months, I was always looking for some alone time. Not just face time, face-and-body time.
(Inappropriate picture, obviously sex. MARCI freezes on that picture)
Uh oh! How did THAT get here?
(Fake embarrassment. She zooms in on just the faces, which get a little blurry.)
That’s better! I mean, this is the family hour. Lots of little ankle biters wanting to pay tribute to Uncle Glenn, as well they should. As well they should. So where was I?
(Takes her jacket off and hangs it on the mike stand. Underneath a skimpy lace camisole)
Is it just me or is it getting hot in here?
(Comes to sit on the edge of the stage, making herself comfortable. Fake radio DJ voice)
I’m Yvette DaBomb – welcome to Pillowtalk. It’s dark outside, rain is falling and it looks like we’re locked in here together for the duration, so why don’t I show you all a good time?
(Tinny laughter)
Yeah, without Glenn the party will never be the same. I remember when we broke up – I broke up with him, contrary to the story I KNOW he was telling some people – it was all about issues. Trust issues. He used to say to me –
(bad Nicholson impression)
You can’t handle the truth! And I told him you’re the one who can’t handle the truth!
(Starting to get steamed)
Telling everyone you were looking for a nice girl so you could settle down, I mean, that wasn’t true, was it? He just wanted to see inside every pair of undies on the West Coast. And I mean, that’s OK! I say, God bless him! But don’t go around telling me who I can hug. Who I can text! Who I can talk to!
(Reining herself in.)
Oh, he had issues. But I liked him just the way he was. I accepted him. I think that’s what love is; you’ve got to accept people so they can accept themselves. But Glenn was a difficult person to satisfy. He was always looking – you know – for that next little “tweak”. There was always just something that needed fixing, something that could be better. “Added value”, he called it. Am I right? That’s why he was such a successful entrepreneur; he was always looking for ways to add value. Like he wouldn’t tell me my breasts were too small; he’d always say, “Look at these.” And he’d show me those pictures on his phone. I know the police said afterwards there were no pictures of breasts on his phone and of course we don’t want to remember him that way. But I know what I saw. Glenn was a “seeker”. Always searching for…something better.
When I got the implants he was so happy at first! 32B to a D is a big jump!!
(Cradles her breasts – shown off to good effect in the flimsy camisole.)
He was like a kid with a new toy, that’s for sure! He said he only wanted me to be admired, he wanted “the real Marci” to come on out. He would tell me some of you – don’t take this the wrong way – were saying behind my back that I wasn’t right for him. I have to say you guys were making it hard for me to be your friend what with all the back chat I was hearing.
(Works to calm herself)
Naturally I wanted to check his emails and his Facebook page after he was saying things like that! And we trusted each other with the passwords – in spite of what he probably told you – plus he always used his dog’s name – Welliver – as his password and you just don’t forget a thing like that. Imagine my shock when I found out those implants he had begged me to get and then to show off to his friends – were another point against me! “Not exactly wife material” people were saying! That kind of thing!! Yeah, I was upset at first and it led directly to our breakup.
I mean, he was setting me up! Am I right? He was setting me up to fail! Then I saw him doing that with other people he said he was “mentoring” (air quotes.) This is the hardest thing to admit about Glenn – that he acted like an asshole sometimes. Like his left hand wouldn’t see what his right hand was doing! I put it down to his competitive spirit. Just like Welliver – that dog never could resist using his teeth! Grrrr! Had to get his teeth around something!! I mean, he’s a dog! So when he plays, you expect him to play rough.
There I was stuck with this big bill! Not to mention getting a full Brazilian every two weeks – I mean was that for him or me? Oh, you don’t mind the pain, he tells me. You like it. I mean, why would you do this otherwise? Why would anyone?
I told him flat out, I’d do anything to please you. I admitted it. What’s it gonna take? You’ve got me, so tell me what to do. Glenn could be generous, but usually he was more generous after he’d been satisfied. You know what I’m saying. I mean the guy would give you the shirt off his back – he did give me the shirt off his back – of course I was naked at the time! (Laugh). He took my clothes! But he did have a way of dodging responsibility. First guy into the restaurant but when it came time to pay the check, I mean, where was he? Am I off course here? I felt he leaned just a little too hard on his friends, didn’t you? But we forgave him! He said to me, you can work it off. Clean my house and …other ways. Called me his little porn star! (More sex photos) Then he sold me that crappy car that never worked! But I still had to pay for it! I have to say that made me kind of uncomfortable. Goddess or porn star, Glenn, which is it? Oh, he was itching to make a porno! Said, we’re all going to make a million dollars! Doin’ what comes naturally!
I warned him, Glenn, if you do, the jury will come back against you! Everyone will know you’re not the saint you pretended to be. But he says to me, Marci, there are no male sluts. There’s female sluts and goodtime guys, that’s what and there’s no coming back from it. (Flips through the pictures in frustration, looking for a good one.) Not like breaking up made any difference because we couldn’t stay away from each other! We were combustible, all right. He always said he never came so hard with anyone else. Even jacking off! It was always me he wanted to think about.
So we forgave him! Didn’t we always? I know he was pulling these same stunts with other girls – you Jeannie and you Rebecca – he showed me your emails & texts. Bet you didn’t know about that! But who could say no to this guy? Look at that! (Zoom close-up of the photo) I mean, who could resist those eyes? Awwww! That’s what he seems to be saying. Awww! Make me! Ya gonna make me?
(Switches pictures)
I know we were all getting sick of THAT picture.This one was taken the day he died.
(Naked torso making the “strongman” gesture)
He was so proud of his body – as well he should have been. He was in the gym two hours a day turning ugly flab to rock hard muscle. Sweat is fat crying, that’s what he used to say! Oh, he used to slap my ass to get me going! Beat my ass until it hurt. Clocked me too, once, till I saw stars. I’m not saying I didn’t deserve it sometimes. We knew how to push each other’s buttons. He was easy to tease because he had this fake persona and he wouldn’t admit that he had. I mean, I had lost everything– put all my skin in the game – he made sure of that. I said, “I’m all in.” I was completely dependent – but he was still pretending he was free as air!
I forget whose idea it was to take these pictures.
(Several shower photos).
They’re good, right? I mean this could be an Old Spice ad! “Habit Rouge” is what I mean to say. That’s the stuff he liked. Called it his “hunting coat.” But he did need new photos for his page because he was so much better toned. He was bench pressing like 260 – he could lift me with one hand. I have a photo of that somewhere here.
(Shuffles through the photos – some of them are crime scene.)
How did THAT get there?
(Fake surprise.)
Oh, that’s right. I’m helping the police. It’s something only I can do, because I was closest to him. I was the last to see him alive.
(Puts on professorial glasses, takes out a laser pointer)
Look at this. Don’t you think there had to be at least two murderers? That’s the first thing I said to them. I mean, who could take advantage of this guy, he was so strong! I’m surprised they didn’t wait till he was asleep – you know, and vulnerable. But the police think the attack started right here in the bathroom. You can see there’s a shell casing from a 25 caliber there on the tiles. So she shot him, I guess. Or that guy did – you know, the people that broke in. Glenn was in trouble with lots of people he owed money to. He had all these sketchy roommates and then there were the thousands of girls he’s disappointed! Looking for a wife!
(snorts in disbelief)
What a line! “The perfect girl to share a family and kids. Happily ever after. You know, he said that after death families are raised up together and come together in heaven. I don’t know who he’s with now, though, since he spread himself so thin. He did have a rough upbringing you probably all remember – he talked about it enough. Inspirational, that’s what it was. But he couldn’t get away from that family fast enough.
Who knows? I’d really like to know how heaven works. Maybe you get to select your own company. Bring anyone you want! That must be where he is, don’t you think? Because he suffered when he died. Heaven’s the right place for those who die young. He didn’t get the chance to do the really terrible things – you know those things the living regret, those things we can’t take back or ever undo.
But the first shot didn’t kill him – you can see here where he went and stood over the sink, probably trying to figure out what had happened. You’ve got to ask yourself, what did he see, there, looking in the mirror? A guy whose pretty face was shot away? The police are being real boneheads about this, saying the shot came last! I mean, I wasn’t there, but ask yourself, what kind of sense does THAT make? Who breaks into a house to attack a guy in a shower with a knife? It’s just the stupidest thing that I can think of. But have it your way, Officer Malarkey.
(Rolls her eyes.)
You’re the professional! State-sponsored. servant! Twenty years of crime scene reconstruction! I’m just a girl who loved the victim, who lived there and cleaned the place and picked up after the owner! Naturally my DNA is everywhere. I cleaned up the dog poop too, if Glenn was too lazy to walk Welliver. Dogs need walking twice a day! Right! But I couldn’t be there every minute! I mean, I had a life, too! I have bills to pay! I had to work! I was trying to have a life too! I even joined Linkups because I said, if you can date, I can date. You know what he said? He said, “I’m not comfortable with that.”
(Mimics Glenn)
He made damn sure I texted those guys I wasn’t coming! “My ex isn’t comfortable with that!” Then I asked him, so when are you going to GET comfortable with that? Don’t I deserve a little hottie of my own? Somebody taking care of me? How many girls does one guy get?
“When I get married” he said. “You can be bridesmaid at my wedding! I’ve got my eye on the perfect girl – she’s saying no right now” – he meant you, Kira – “but I’m the guy that turns No into Yes.” And he was, wasn’t he! He so often was. That was his rep, all right. He always knew how to change your mind and make you want it, that thing you said you would never do. He kept digging till he got what he was after.
He asked me, “what am I doing wrong with Kira? How should I play this? She says she only wants me for a friend!”
I did wonder if he’d met his match. What do they call that – the Murphy effect? If you leave every territory after you’re finished with it, looking for new fields to conquer, I mean, eventually you’re going to fall off a cliff! Am I right? Pissarro and Cortez and all those guys! Stepped off the world! Right into a pile of skulls.
He probably would have made you marry him Kira, whether you wanted to or not! You’d wake up the morning after, asking, “What just happened?” I say you dodged a bullet! But nobody dodges every bullet and not in a tiny enclosed space like that shower. Got him right in the jaw till he was spitting out teeth. They say those low caliber bullets ricochet around in a person’s head. I mean, this one bounced right off his skull! Under the skin. He has hardheaded, was Glenn! Proud of that hardheadedness, too!
(Raps on her own skull.)
Don’t be such a pussy, he used to tell me! You gotta be all business if you plan to get things done! The police say those low caliber bullets are the choice of mobsters. You know, mob hits. “Execution style!” I told them, “Look for bill collectors. He was having trouble hanging onto his house and blaming me cause my credit was in the toilet and he had to hire the moving van for my stuff.” But Officer Numnutz says, doesn’t your grandfather have a .25 that’s gone missing? I mean, WHAT kind of relevance can that possibly have? My grandfather can’t find his own teeth! Everyone has guns, especially around here. And people gravitate to the little, light ones. “Concealed carry.” But I’ve never even SHOT a gun. So don’t look at me!
So Numnutz says – I’m sorry, Officer Mendez, I see you over there but if you can’t tell the truth in a eulogy then where can you tell it? He says to me, Look where the guy ran down the hall. Follow the blood trail. So Glenn’s getting away and they came after him with knives. These are the defensive wounds – here and here – where Glenn grabbed onto the knife for a moment and held it. They’re slippery, those things, with the blood flying everywhere.
Here’s where they gave him the “coup de grace”. Slit his throat. I mean, probably, judging from the blood pool.
(Acknowledges audience gasps)
I mean, GROSS right? That’s what I said! Heinous stuff! So here –
(blurry photo of sock clad foot and bloody shoulder)
Here’s where she dragged him back to the shower. Now why would she do that, Officer Mendez asks me. Maybe she was trying to revive him, Officer Bananas, if that’s really your name. Trying to wash off all that blood. Forgive me if I can’t remember every little detail about everything. I’ve got stuff on my mind. I mean, my best friend just died! Died at the peak of his life! So how do I know what murderers would do?
Maybe he hit her. Maybe it was self-defense.
(Picture of Glenn working a punching bag)
You know, hit out at her and she was just defending herself. Like I tried to tell you, he was really strong. He owned guns too. Unregistered ones. Proud of that. I know I saw one somewhere. And he had to use a knife to cut the rope when he tied me to the bed. Oh, didn’t I tell you about that? I thought I did – it was all about that porno he wanted to make. He first wanted to shoot it in the woods. That was his big idea. Or maybe on the hood of a car in rush hour traffic! Impossible to reason with the guy. Shake some sense into him! What about the looky-lous! They’ll know about you, about us! What about Kira! What will she say? She’ll drop you like a hot potato. The cops say “everybody has an alibi”. Well duh! I was miles away! But do you think the people who – I mean the people who did this if it wasn’t professional – would even remember? I mean, you’d want to forget a thing like this as fast as you could, wouldn’t you? If you loved the guy? And everyone loved him. He was the sweetest, most thoughtful, most generous guy who ever lived.
(Fumbles with papers on the lectern, starts to cry)
Can we get an appletini up here? That’s what he always ordered for me. Appletinis. He said, “I like the smell.”
I miss him. We had so many plans. We were going to walk the Freedom Trail. Together. Before we die. We swore a blood oath. Everyone says that it’s fantastic, that you come back from that trip a different person.
OK. I see you asking me to wrap things up. To cut it short (throat slitting gesture) I’m getting the hook! Don’t worry about it. I’m used to it. That’s what Glenn used to say he loved most about me, that I knew how to laugh at myself. Before I go I wanted to lead us in a song. (Quavering voice) If you get to heaven before I do
Coming for to carry me home – come on everybody, you know this one! Tell all my friends I’m a-coming after you! Coming for to carry me home! Swing low – sweet chariot –
In spring of 1961 my father announced that he was giving up his job building public housing in Cleveland. He would be taking a position as Director of Refugees for the American Friends Service Committee in Morocco. We were to sell our house and almost everything we owned and move to Africa. I was only ten years old and my parents had a lot of explaining to do before I could even begin to understand. I had just been diagnosed with “myopia” and told I would need glasses for long distance vision and I was privately worrying about going blind. I recall asking Mom if we would be “poor” and she gave some needlessly confusing answer about how both she and Dad would be working for $50 a month. My sisters had started a pattern of ridiculing my fears so I could only find answers in books. Mom and Dad told us we could each take ten books on our move and gave us “carte blanche” at the College bookstore. I preferred history; somehow the disruptions in the lives of husband-seeking princesses sent to foreign courts seemed bizarrely comforting. We had to have a series of shots that sent us all to bed for a full day. I recall applying for passports while mothers’ friend swore, hand uplifted, that she had always known us and that we had no desire to sabotage or plot against the U.S.
We held a yard sale where I sold all my dolls and comic books. The cats and dog were given away. My friends were very excited that I was going to northern Africa and asked a lot of questions about the Sahara and Arabian horses that made the trip sound like it might be more of an adventure than a threat.
First, we flew to England to stay in a castle used as a Quaker conference center where Mom and Dad would receive training. At that time, I was reading about the French Revolution and was particularly taken by the Affair of the Necklace. Living in a castle – it had beautiful grounds – made me part of the story and only seemed appropriate. Then we flew to Switzerland to leave elder sister Merrill at the International School. Mallory had been enrolled at the Quaker boarding school at Barnesville, Ohio and Mom and Dad took it for granted that she would stay there while we travelled; but she absolutely refused, even contacting her congressman for help in springing her from that prison! Merrill still recalls all of us driving around Geneva crammed into a taxi looking for some family to take her in. Somebody had heard of a cleaning lady who might know someone who – etc. Since we were in Switzerland anyway, we might as well take a look at Mont Blanc. Dad rented a Peugeot, which he always said afterwards he had to kick up and down the Vosges Mountains; in Morocco, he made sure we had a Citroen with a special lever allowing it to ford streams! To get to Chamonix we had to take the Grimsel Pass, and it was grim, a sheer drop with no railing of any kind. We all sat as far as possible on one side of the car. But Chamonix was worth it.
We also saw Paris. Like most people, my sisters and I were stunned and seduced by the food. French breakfasts were a dream come true – chocolate in big drinking bowls, croissants, jam in elegant little earthenware pots, and curls of moist butter. Heaven! Picnics in the French countryside with bread, salami, cheese and iron-tasting mineral water. We saw Carcassonne, which is a living fairy tale. The streets erupted on Bastille Day – just in time for baby sister Avril’s birthday. She was thrilled to see an entire nation celebrating her birth with songs, fireworks, sparklers and parades.
My first sight of Morocco was very different from the desert I expected. There were fields of brilliant red poppies in bloom, hills dotted with stubby trees (sometimes with goats in them!) I was amazed by how people would stand unmoving in the road when a car was approaching, forcing the car to go around, and how children would come right up and speechlessly just stare. Berber girls were blue-eyed and clad in multiple wild colors while Muslim women wore full hijab with only their eyes showing. Their outfits looked very uncomfortable and hot to me but Arab girls my age didn’t seem to have to wear them, although grown men still looked at us strangely and became visibly excited by our Bermuda shorts. At one point Mom – wearing a straight skirt – was “goosed” by a man walking behind her. All this had to be explained to me by apologetic parents struggling to maintain compassion toward what they saw as crippling “medieval” religious beliefs.
Our house was in Oujda, a town on the edge of the Algerian border. Because the Algerians were waging a war of independence against the French colonialists, Arab refugees were pouring across the border and had to be housed in tents and encampments. Morocco bragged that it had avoided becoming completely French because of its strong monarchy (in the fifties, King Mohammed V reputedly threw a journalist to the lions.) The current king, Moulay Hassan II, had several feisty sisters who wore jeans and refused to take the veil. My favorite, Ayesha, was a wrecker of sports cars. Then there was the great resistance fighter, Jamila, tortured by the French. We heard many legends like this from local potentate, Moulay Suleiman, who entertained us to tea while his wives peered excitedly at us through a wooden screen. Tea was served in glass cups nestled in silver filigree holders; it was mint, bright green and at least half sugar. It was not my thing but we were warned to be polite. Moulay Suleiman invited us to a meshoui, the celebratory cooking of an entire sheep in a pit. Even the eyeballs and lungs are eaten. (The eye is a great prize.) We were also treated to the sight of armed horsemen in ceremonial dress riding straight at us, stopping inches away and firing their rifles in the air while shouting. It was impressive, and they would do it as many times as we wanted.
The Oujda house (Dar el Baraka, House of the Blessed) was enormous, a central tower ornamented with arrow slits and two big stuccoed wings in a 2-acre garden. The whole property was surrounded by a cement wall with broken glass cemented on top. The garden contained a guest house, (used only for storage), a garage (where the gardener and his wives lived) and swimming pool that a special town ordinance banned from ever being full. However, the garden had a complex set of irrigation ditches managed by the gardener Lakhdar. In the right wing lived a team of British nurses and Midwest Quaker volunteers. There was also a cook named Embarka who lived behind the kitchen with her son, Mujahed. Embarka was a fantastic chef; my favorite dishes of hers were rabbit stew with olives, and for dessert, chocolate balls – basically fudge rolled round and around in her hennaed hands.
The central tower contained an enormous two-story “salon” with two living areas, a long dining table with sixteen chairs and a fireplace the size of a mudroom. During the morning Embarka and her helper Fatima (Lakhdar’s youngest wife) would close the long interior shutters and swab the terrazzo floors with water; this kept the big room cool all day. The tower and rooftop terrace were reached by outside steps shrouded in brilliant bougainvillea; at night, the view of the stars was spectacular, and sometimes sister Genevieve and I were allowed to sleep up there.
Our rooms were in the left-hand wing, all three sisters together in one room with a big fireplace and its own bathroom. The bath had a hot water tank with a pilot light that had to be lit – “Boudagaz” – often singeing our eyebrows.
My sister Genevieve and I loved exploring the garden, which was always excitingly alive with bats, birds and feral cats. The guest house was full of boxes of onion-skin correspondence from previous tenants of the House of the Blessed, French colonialists bewailing their separation from the mother country. From our perch atop the wall we watched Lakhdar manage his irrigation ditches. Poor Avril, aged only six, wanting desperately to join our club, asked how we got up there. We told her we knew how to fly but we wouldn’t be teaching her. This caused her to break into the Grand Salon while Mom entertained ladies to tea, sobbing, “Genevieve and Alysse won’t teach me to fly!” Mom stomped out on the terrace shouting, “You teach Avril to fly this minute.”
We grudgingly tied Avril up in time-consuming paperwork to “join our club”, insisting she submit a urine sample. She brought us a glass of white port instead, which we deemed acceptable. Unfortunately, at that point my thirteen-year-old sister and a 22-year-old intern from the Midwest named Bill discovered each other and became boyfriend and girlfriend conducting a steamy 50’s affair, with no pushback from our deliberately blinded parents. I developed a relationship with one of the cats, who I named Christopher, and fed with scraps from our meals. Apparently, this made the other intern, a heartless, handsome and ideologically rigid idiot resolve to poison them all. Christopher, who had always refused to enter the house, crawled under my bed to die. I turned to Agatha Christie, who explained the heartless idiot perfectly to my eleven-year-old mind.
Then it was time for school. The world outside the walls was even more problematic. At our gate stood a licorice seller. The previous Refugee Director’s little boy sent us a “Missing you” postcard to deliver to him, but the hard, stuck-together clumps of licorice failed to gratify Genevieve and me, who preferred expensive French pastry sold at The Colombo. When translated into dirhams our allowance provided a very favorable exchange rate. The licorice seller also guarded the spot of a recent murder, showing off the gruesome bloodstain to passersby.
The schools spoke French. The previous director’s children had been home-schooled until their French was “perfect”, but Mom and Dad decided to throw us in at the deep end and hope for the best. Until we made friends, Jennifer and I were likely to have stones thrown at us by Arab children shouting, “Romains!”; slang for Westerners.
To attend school, you needed a “cartable” (briefcase) and a “tablier” (smock) purchaseable at a weird store right out of a Humphrey Bogart jungle equipment movie. They also sold block chocolate and warm Pepsi (nobody ever had ice.) “Lunch” was two pieces of French bread (small pieces) with anything between them. A chunk of cheese or chocolate was perfectly fine. Mine was struck out of my hand on the very first day and stepped on by a boy screaming wildly with delight. “Ha ha! Now you can starve!” Luckily, I acquired a wonderful friend – Zubeida Benkhala, who said her father was an Algerian general. And he may have been, because she lived in a big house and not the refugee encampment. I went to visit her after school one day and was a hit because I could sing the English version of “Ne Racroche Pas” (“Don’t Hang Up.”) The French would not associate with Arabs and since I associated with Arabs they would not associate with me. All of us had Arab friends, Avril’s was Karima Bouzidi and Genevieve’s was Salima. Arabs were friendlier.
School was terrifying. The teachers were physically abusive, the bathroom was a Turkish hole. When marched up to the blackboard, poor Avril just peed in front of everyone. We all learned enough French to get by; I began to dream in the language. My teacher, Monsieur Touati, couldn’t decide whether to make me his enemy or his pet, since I wouldn’t be his stooge. (I was not especially polite to adults.) After I left, he wrote to me, demanding pictures, when I sent one, he said it was too dark and he couldn’t see me properly. I think that was the end of our correspondence.
Life was enlivened by visitors and tourism. NY Times war correspondent Tom Brady was posted locally with his entire family; they invited us out to “watch the bombing” for entertainment after dinner. I found staring at explosions over darkened hills a dull experience but my father was impressed by Brady and considered him a celebrity.
Another visitor was Quaker historian Paul Johnson and his wife, who introduced us to a monastery full of interesting and highly educated European monks. We visited the holy city of Moulay Idris where infidels (such as us) cannot remain after dark. We travelled to Meknes, Fez and Casablanca and visited all the souks where we learned to bargain for leather goods (all you had to do was threaten to leave.) We visited a leather-dyeing facility – glorious pools of deep color but the stench was so terrible we held handkerchiefs over our noses.
Most interesting was Melilla, a coastal city still belonging to Spain where we had to go through customs both in and out. Moroccan customs actually took down our tire identification numbers to make sure we wouldn’t buy new tires and fail to declare them! We travelled to Volubilis, gorgeous Roman ruins with huge storks’ nests atop the columns, saw the Sahara Desert and the Atlas Mountains with its snow and ski lodges, penetrated deep into the earth at the Grotte de Chameau (where I had a panic attack.)
Back home Genevieve played flute with the Oujda Philharmonic Orchestra and Avril took ballet; I read the Complete Molesworth and started a newspaper for the “inmates” of the Dar. Mom and Dad and the Quaker team taught sewing, carpentry and electrical wiring to the refugees and wanted to have a graduation celebration with food, games and awards. Jennifer and I gave a popular puppet show and the women danced. The next day we heard all the women had been beaten up by their husbands for dancing in front of foreign men. I began sleepwalking. It was spring and I was ready to leave Morocco. The French and Algerian war ended with an Algerian win. Ben Bella rode triumphantly through the streets while the women yu-yued from behind their hijabs. Mom and Dad and Avril prepared to move to Algeria. Genevieve would be sent to Plumly school, and I would be sent to live with my aunt, uncle and four boy cousins in Wayland, Massachusetts.
Since publication of my psychological thriller, Woman Into Wolf I find myself fielding two main questions: one, what is a psychological thriller, and two, where do I get my ideas?
I usually end up telling the story about how as a kid I added “motive” cards to the game of Clue. I just wasn’t satisfied with a “solution” telling us Mrs. White killed Colonel Mustard in the ballroom with a candlestick. Why? I wanted to know. What the hell possessed her? Psychological studies typically concern themselves with the wilderness of the mind, and the “thriller” description represents extreme adventuring where anything – literally – might happen.
Where I get my ideas is a much easier question. There’s never a need to make anything up. I am a devoted and fascinated reader of true crime. If anything, reality needs toning down to make it fictionally believable. Woman Into Wolf weaves three real cases together in an effort to answer the question, What possessed them? to a reader’s satisfaction.
Certain cases stick in my mind like pebbles while the pearls of fiction form slowly around them. I puzzle. I speculate. I analyze. One example shows what I mean.
On August 4, 1999 two young men from Boston hiked into Rattlesnake Canyon in New Mexico. Planning to make camp for one night before moving on. They were college graduates, best friends, “seeing the sights” on their way to California. One of the pair, a Jack Kerouac fan and an aspiring writer, was considering turning their adventures into a travel piece. He was the one airlifted out on Sunday, August 8 with “moderate to severe dehydration.” His friend left in a bodybag.
What happened?
The survivor told police he only stabbed his friend – two times – because his friend begged him to. Because of the planned brevity of their stay they had taken in only three small bottles of water, but got lost, became disoriented and wandered in circles. They left desperate notes for the park rangers, then became convinced the rangers were playing tricks on them. They were certain the buzzards overhead were just waiting for signs of manifest weakness to attack. We know this because they recorded this part in the joint travel journal they were keeping. Strangely, the dead man wrote nothing about wanting to die or asking his friend to hurry the process along.
The rangers were bothered by the survivor’s story. No one had ever become lost in this small park in its hundred year history. The rangers found the campers a ten- minute walk from the trailhead. After his friend’s death, the survivor covered the body with rocks weighing as much as fifty pounds. Why hadn’t that energy been used to climb the hill where the parking lot was clearly visible? The coroner determined that the six foot tall, 180-pound camper died just a few hours before rescue. If the murder hadn’t occurred, he would have undoubtedly been rescued with his friend.
But there was no legal need for extensive ratiocination: New Mexico law doesn’t give a free pass even to mercy killers. The survivor was indicted for murder. The survivor claimed to be chastened by his traumatizing experience but he also said that he had done the right thing, and even knowing what he knew now, he would do it again. The dead man’s family rallied round him; publicly stating that this was a tragedy for all of them, and there was no way this loyal friend would have intentionally harmed his buddy. The survivor’s lawyer first attempted a defense of temporary insanity (not allowed under New Mexico law, which requires insanity to be documented and of long standing) then went for “involuntary intoxication” – a legal defense – thinking of the salt buildup caused by a level of dehydration historically linked to hallucinations and poor coping skills. Incidentally, the judge rejected this defense.
So what happened? If you have any propensity for structuring psychological thrillers, your neurons must be collectively firing. This tragic scenario is like a two person play by Beckett or Pinter. It’s pretty obvious any question about who did what to whom is secondary to the problem of identity. Who were these people? Two young men who had always done everything right, by all accounts, in their families, at church and school, on the job, even in their intimate relationships. The dead man was on his way to California to attend graduate school. I don’t know about you, but whenever I hear about compulsive I-dotters and T-crossers I always picture people who are “outer-directed.” That means they’ve traditionally taken their life cues from externals – leaving their inner beings unexplored – possibly even unconsulted. In a good psychological thriller, what the internal voyager discovers in his subconscious is as much a surprise to him as to the reader. What this story makes apparent is that as soon as the outward signals were removed, these two young men fell apart pretty dramatically.
When the rangers found the survivor, he was waiting quietly in his tent, next to the cairn of stones he built over his deaf friend’s body. Often when he talked about ending his friend’s suffering, it sounded as if he was also ending his own. It was just easier to wait for rescue without his friend around. Therein, to my mind, lies Clue #1. These friends grew up together and did everything together, seemingly using their relationship as a sort of existential echo-location. I am I because you are you, and if you are there, then I must be here. It is the demanding drive for self-definition within each of us that causes us to sever – or at least yank sharply on – tether and lifeline alike. One of the friends was the leader and one was the follower. And it seems the leader had made a series of catastrophically bad decisions. We all know how hard that can be to live with – and to live down. In the noisy whistling of the leadership vacuum reproach becomes unbearable. In today’s reality-show world, increasingly it is only the public self that matters. Unknown failures can be literally “undone”. The Victorians understood this very well. In their day, “status preservation” was a major motive for murder in both the upper and middle class.
One of the questions the detectives had was why the campers tried to burn a sleeping bag for a signal fire within sight of a large dead tree. Surely a little arson is preferable to death? As it turned out, the sleeping bag was a failure as fuel. The bag had been chosen, the survivor said, because they had two and needed only one. Although everyone who knew the pair insisted they were complete heterosexuals, my mind does a little U-turn on this piece of information. The prosecution even tried to make much of the fact that they had once shared a girlfriend, only to be shot down by the complete lack of cooperation of the relevant witness. Once again, the fewer people around with first- hand knowledge of our psychic and emotional dissonances, the easier we may find it to go on living.
I also think we live in an “instant gratification” society where the only strategy for change we are used to is the “make it stop” wish. “This isn’t any fun, let’s not do it any more.”
“Yeah man, this is getting to be a real drag.”
But how to make it stop just when we want it to, if there are no buttons, no switches? How dare the cosmos be so unresponsive when we’ve decided we need a new game? This question – the relationship between reality and one’s demands — leads us further into the psychological wilderness.
The young men from Boston listened to the ranger’s instructions with only half an ear between the two of them. They failed to take the recommended amount of water, they searched for non-existent campsites and they abandoned their topographical map because they couldn’t read it. We all know that any sense of superiority carries shadowy concomitants of guilt and fear. If others knew our superiority, they would resent us. Even hate us, and I know that because in their situation, I would feel the same. Unlike Jack Kerouac, these young men grew up with an easy confidence that law existed to protect their rights and privileges. But their education had taught them that not everyone is so fortunate.
Hence the stated fear that the rangers were playing tricks on them, moving trail markers and teasing the campers with unreachable bottles of water. By the third day the young men feared that the rangers would cover up their deaths to hide their own incompetence.
And then there are the buzzards, the pitiless “eyes in the sky” waiting to peck out their own eyes. What do you do when death is inevitable and the universe doesn’t seem to care? The ancients handled this question through sacrifice; demanding the right to pick the next to fall. It is an insult to the magnificence of our human capabilities to let the buzzards choose.
Since a psychological thriller must of necessity concern itself with subjects’ lives as a whole, it is a real question where to start. Author William Goldman’s advice, to start “as late in the story as possible” is good, I think. In this case, I can’t help but feel that the real story begins afterwards, in the throes of survivor’s complex. The surviving camper was sentenced to fifteen years. He served fifteen months and has now gone back to his blamelessly unexamined life, in spite of being handed a literary subject Kerouac would envy and perhaps only Hemingway could handle. One can’t help but wonder what his days and nights are like. The Apaches who still protect Rattlesnake Canyon could have told him, when you kill something, it becomes part of you forever.
Alysse Aallyn 