Alysse Aallyn

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  • Wild With Possibility: teen diaries of Alysse Aallyn

    Tues 7 May 68


    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, trùs 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.

  • Wild With Possibility: teen diaries of Alysse Aallyn

    Southwark Theatre School – Thur. 21 Mar 68


    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.

  • Wild With Possibility: teen diaries of Alysse Aallyn

    Sat 18 Feb 68


    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.

  • Wild With Possibility: teen diaries of Alysse Aallyn

    Sun 21 Jan 68


    “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 cafĂ© 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.”

  • Wild With Possibility: teen diaries of Alysse Aallyn

    Thursday, 30 Nov. 1967


    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.

  • Wild With Possibility: teen diaries of Alysse Aallyn

    Just after midnight Fri 3 Nov 67


    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.

  • Wild With Possibility: teen diaries of Alysse Aallyn

    Thurs. 19 Oct 67


    This is all I need: I’m in the infirmary with a fever and swollen glands. My throat making me super miserable! No sailing for me – parents suggested it instead of Parents’ Day. These blankets are so stingy; I have all the blankets they had in the blanket closet and still I’m shivering. Damn things are razor thin. It’s the same room I was in last time, The Alysse Aallyn Memorial Chamber. At least they have a bathtub (not that they let you use it enough.)


    I used to visit Shawn here when he had his shin splints. Back when he loved me. Snuck in an Andrew Garve – pretty thin plot. Begged Nostrils to let me call Aynsley for a copy of Fathers and Sons. She gave me pills instead – there’s everything wrong with modern science in a nutshell. (One of the pills is a charming turquoise.) I’m sure the Russians could cure whatever I have. (Freud would not be a good idea for a swollen gland sufferer.)

    Miss Wickersham in to say Shawn Kobler just arrived with a head injury from soccer! That boy is very accident prone. Will he open his eyes to find the year erased and think we are still dating! There’s a plot! When Miss Wickersham’s back was turned I used the office phone to call Mum – took some pleasure in alarming her. But I had to call because of the sailing. They don’t know what they’ll do now (I know. They’ll go sailing.) Avril has a boil she has to take penicillin for and they’re taking HER!

    Now I’m too warm but that beats an arctic fit. I don’t even need a book I’m so busy wondering who Shawn will be when he wakes up. Jekyll? Hyde?

    Fri. 20 Oct 67
    Accidentally woke the nurse prowling around trying to find out what time it was (5 AM.) Mom called at ten said they decided to go sailing without me. (Natch.) Mom offered to take me to tea (“show me off” was how she put it) at the Annual Service Committee Meeting. I suppose Casey and I could go before the play. She invited us to spend the night but we GAVE to get back here at 11PM at the latest – it’s Halloween Parties – what with the Tunnels & the Crypt the world’s queerest entertainment. I’m going as a wart – which ought to be effortless considering my swollen glands.

    Mom reported something weird – she USED that soap Robin sent me – it broke open and there’s a tiny switchblade inside! I begged her to SAVE it for me – she is dubious. Aren’t these illegal? It’s an inch long – press a button and the blade comes winging out. I won’t thank Robin but as he must have known I covet it tremendously. Avril was so taken with it she said, “Do we have to tell her?”

    Slept all day – Nostrils is going off and Mrs. Wickersham coming on. Bazarov so pitiful in Fathers & Sons. Paul Petrovich is the most sympathetic character; very finely drawn. “He strolled as far as the end of the garden
lifted his gaze to the sky. But his fine dark eyes reflected only the glimmer of the stars. He was not born a romantic and his soul, so dry and elegant, passionate and misanthropic in the French way, was incapable of reverie.” Bravo!

    Sun 22 Oct 67
    Slept through Vespers and what everyone tells me was a very fine sermon by Dr Elton Trueblood. Up on dorm wrote some godawful poetry, read 10 p of one book and 7 of another, then into Casey’s room to bother her. She won’t allow herself to be bothered, however. So here I am back, night and day all fatally screwed up.
    McKenzie’s parents pointed me out to her and said I was “the most beautiful girl” on campus. Tell the photographers is all I can say. Photos look like Mt Rushmore in a light drizzle.

    Thurs 26 Oct 67
    Easy to become lethargic and apathetic in a system depending on routine. Master Gwill doing me the honor of treating me like an adult, shaking me out of my coma. Tells me he has never seen so much “natural talent” blah blah blah. Now I’m embarrassed about all the mean things I’ve said about him. (He likes Steinbeck! So bourgeois!)

    He presented me with a ticket to see Marcel Marceau! He was a little crushed that I have already experienced this but OBVIOUSLY it will be different as that was YEARS AGO. I had to say I was seated behind a pillar at the Paris Opera and could barely see (although maybe that was Mme Butterfly.)

    When they let me out of the infirmary I knew I had an excuse to miss dinner so I put on ski pants and a ski sweater, tied my hair back and walked all the way through Girls’ Bounds and Boys’ Bounds down to the farm. Climbed a dead-looking tree and watched the horses eat and the sun set. Cleared my eyes and lungs.

    It occurred to me that it doesn’t matter who I am. As I sit in this tree I can be anybody! None of my failures or mistakes even matter because I don’t matter. What a relief! Felt I was in a state of grace. The pageant of the world’s beauty is the model of perfect giving.

    Bible class just ending. We are reading The Great Divorce. “So why desire truth if the truth hurts?” asked Biff Withers who is the only person in this class who ever asks an intelligent question.

    “Knowledge brings freedom and freedom is worth having” was the answer.

    Uh oh! Don’t tell the slaves about freedom. You could see the restless stirring. I nearly stood up and cheered. But of course I didn’t!

    I have far too much to read. 5 books in 2 weeks, 3 of them being over 300 p long. Insanity, that’s what it is! Rather read Polidori’s The Vampyre
 Occasional flashes of Byron do come through, that magnificent pagan! He did become a sadistic, soulless, stupid fiend when in fact he was neither stupid nor soulless. Shows what can happen.

    I feel in Byron lies the secret of the world’s malaise. Must steal him for Lord Noone. When he broke bottles on the ceiling of the room below his wife accouchement I was his forever. It’s the Bad Boy Problem.

    Lindles came in and asked, “What’s that?”
    “I said, “Writer’s practice book”.
    “Are you writing about me?”
    “I am now!”

    Fri. 27 Oct 67
    Stunning day, warm for the end of Oct. I ought to be
    a) Sitting in my tree; or
    b) Fast asleep;
    c) Reading a ridiculously romantic novel and loving every minute of it

    Instead here I am in 214 with have a red sign on my door so I can read and eat brownies in peace and quiet. Take 3 aspirin; make a pot of Imperial Gunpowder. I am Insanely Happy. There is a man-made pond about thirty yards away – I could sit here forever just watching the cows come to drink. Who knows what the future holds? At this very moment the Lord of the Manor’s son may spy me through his telescope and say, “Who IS that girl! I like the cut of her jib!”

    Possibly dementia has set in. I promise to start work in JUST ONE MOMENT; first I must arrange clipboard, pens, pencils, Kleenex, script, all effluvia pertaining to my role. Also Master Gwill’s book on Method Acting. And an article on cinema veritĂ© stuffed into my mailbox by some kind hand.

    Tomorrow: the City of Brotherly Love. Last year I enjoyed the Annual Meeting very much; wagering with my sister about the storms raging beneath the participants’ mute and painted masks.

    Sun. 29 Oct 67
    Just saw Paul Newman in Hud. Don’t think it proves anything we didn’t know before. PN sexy, certainly, in an undershirt. It must be awfully exhausting to continually play alcoholics! Note: women do NOT want someone to rip their dresses off, unless it’s under laboratory conditions with us running the experiment.

    Beales used to say loneliness was being by yourself and having a plane pass overhead. I LOVE imagining the lives of others when they don’t know you’re looking in – don’t even know you exist. I’m quite a peeper as I drive thru the townhouse sections of Phila. Trying to write a poem about a man I saw wearing a blue turtleneck and standing under a Tiffany lamp. He was doing something with his hands – tearing up letters, I imagined.

    Casey asked me if I wanted to know why didn’t I ring the doorbell? Because that would WRECK it, I said. She said, “You have a lot of inhibitions.” Taking her to my tree this afternoon to see if she can climb it. We’ll see who has inhibitions.

    Casey and I stalk the streets of Phila in matching wool dresses, tights & hair bows. Tea with folks NOT FUN – they don’t like Casey and show it. They would like to believe everything bad about me is caused by Someone Else. (I’m sure Casey’s mother wishes to believe the same.) Homecoming magical, however. Love the pauses, the stares the silences. We did not talk about Dan!

    Mon. 30 Oct 67
    Just couldn’t manage Too Late In the Year – turned my poem into a story. I need to tell a story! I’ve got a first draft. Oddest sense when I’m writing that I’m telling my own future. You’d think I’d make it sparkly and happy like Casey’s stories but no – they end dreadfully – I can’t help myself. It’s Bluebeard’s wife, creeping along the corridor touching all the doorknobs. If she doesn’t open them she won’t really know. But of course, she does know. “Sus-tension.” That is what I’m looking for.

    Halloween 1967 (Tuesday)
    You dear battered, war-scarred, dog-eared book: I love you so! I know I must have delusions of grandeur refusing to destroy any of these books I have written. Containing plenty of things I’m ashamed of! As I look through this particular book it seems far more comprehensible than the fifteen or so volumes that preceded it. Yet I could not possibly destroy these tear-stained annals, much as I would like to. They are as embarrassing as a friend who heard all the confidences of a long dead love affair yet remains certain of her welcome.

    Not only journals but also stories, fantasies and ghastly, ghastly poems – each contain a seed that may someday sprout. Shall I someday sit at my desk, cynically accomplished yet utterly without ideas and chance upon one of these barely sane mementoes?

    Asked Miss Cluny what she thought of Too Late in the Year. She said she read it twice over before going to sleep and “wants to discuss every word with me.” I must have blanched because she said, “Not to cut it up.” So she must have liked it.

    Fifteen bucks for senior pictures! Sounds like highway robbery but I got the parents on the line.
    “Your father sends his love,” chirruped Mother, while I chomped hard on my cigar and said, “Hold the love and send the cash, sweetheart.”

    Aynsley wants to room with Lindles and I want to room with Casey – everyone would be happy but little Hitler – Aka Miss Womrath – is giving us trouble. She thinks it is Very Bad for us Ever to get what we Want.

    Wed. 1 Nov 67
    Here I sit in Senior Play Rehearsal (Under Milkwood) bored to shriek point.
    Served œ my deten this AM sweeping out the lakehouse & scrubbing canoes. Then ran around the lake (because why not?)

    I am failing to get the measure of Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard and wish I was a narrator like Toss Sheffield (Second Voice.) Master Gwill says he will work with me third period – ugh. I want to be very Freudian and invent something to account for her super-cleanliness but doubt if he’ll approve. I want to make it the grandfather’s and NOT the mother’s fault the way it usually is.


    Halfway through Nicholas & Alexandra; so replete with echoes of sights seen & persons known I feel like I lived it myself. Nobody knew what was coming but they should have (Fr revolution.) Next will read Grand-Duchess Marie’s Education of a Princess. Translated from the Danish, I assume? Or would it be French at the end of her life?


    Matt Romer just mounted the podium and delivered the most asinine speech about Taking the Play Seriously. That’s not the problem – the problem is stage fright. Half the class can’t get word out.

    Have a disturbance detention – means I have to study downstairs in Collection – a frozen, brilliantly lit chamber littered with desks designed for pygmy mutants. Just as well – have a paper to write on The Great Rehearsal and I haven’t started it yet.

    Here goes Matt with his Irish accent! Let’s just hope there are no Irish (or Welsh) people in the audience.

    Master Gwill is taking Casey & Jack B., me & Matt to see Bonnie & Clyde! After reading Pauline Kael’s in the New Yorker I am so excited! (I like her a lot better than Bosley Crowther who relentlessly seizes the obvious.)

  • Wild With Possibility: teen diaries of Alysse Aallyn

    Friday 6 Oct 67


    My personal feeling about novels, poems & plays is you get out of them who you are. They are mirrors. Alas at this institution Art is seized as a Chance to Indoctrinate the Faithless in Someone Else’s Opinion. Which if you don’t regurgitate on test you get a “Z” and are sent to: “The Principal for Punishment. The Whole Class Will Remain Three Hours After School
Silence!” (Miss Goggins.) I guess Kafka (who lived at HOME and worked in insurance) knew what he was talking about.

    Mon 9 Oct 67
    “It’s really true that nothing matters
in coconut grove.”
    Any coconut groves left in this weary world? My usual answer to depression is to plunge myself into reading – psychoanalysis this time – Jung & Freud.

    Much more satisfying than poor Swinburne with his roster of pain& struggle. Novel I’m currently writing, To Die at Noone currently retitled As I Weave My Winding Sheet.

    Tues. 10 Oct 67
    I am going insane but I still don’t know whether I’m doing it on purpose or not. The thing I hate about insanity is its implication of weakness. Maybe it’s just my plan to get out of this place and be allowed to go home. I must be strong. I wouldn’t submit myself to Freud – I can’t imagine sharing the planet with any being who really knew me. Poor foolish girl with delusions of grandeur


    Depression can be so subtle you don’t know it’s over until it’s gone. Currently lying in bed allowing its waves to wash over me. Every one of my nerves has a thousand split ends. Someone dropped books in the hall in front of me and I just stood there and screamed. Wept in the most degrading fashion in front of an ever-enlarging series of sympathetic fossils. Pre-menstrual distress was decided upon. Miss Beeston offered sleeping pills!!! Didn’t accept – who knows what she would do to me once I was in a helpless condition. She’s the one rumored to have murdered her lover with a javelin during the 1936 Olympics. Miss Cluny offered psychiatric help (also refused.)

    Master Gwill did one good and one bad thing today. He gave me a B+ on a paper I personally thought was trashy (Bad) and told me my writing showed “maturity”. (Good. There’s a new one.) As I Weave getting increasingly amaranthine soon to break down utterly. Alas. Simply don’t know how to manage transitions. Yet.

    Still hoping to date (I never learn.) Don’t want to be alone forever. Aynsley and I not getting along very well – she’s going through a bad period too. It’s Quits Again with Mr. Handsome. Plus she finds my insomnia very hard to handle (I don’t like it either.) Climbed a tree the night of the Fall Dance (I had to get away from Simon somehow) and fell in love with a voice I heard up there. Don’t know who it was. I was very nice at the dance. (I even danced with Scooter Obie!)

    Midnight, Fri 13 Oct 67
    If this is unreadable do not blame poor Little Me. Drank coffee till my hands jazzed. Tues. night was an all time depression low. From that point one can only rise. Reading Freud’s life by Ernest Jones has given me “neurasthenia”. Split completely into two personae, one speaking and one pretending to listen. Master Gwill took one of us aside (but which one?) and told us not to waste our talents and wither away. We looked at him owl-eyed.

    He told me to put on a “one woman show”. I don’t want to do THAT but it does suggest an Escape Route. Senior project at a Phila. Theatre would give me two weeks off! Must investigate.

    Strange letter from Dan including one ticket to The Homecoming! Hmm
if I went who would I meet there? I sent him a cold letter saying you broke up with ME and demanding the other ticket.

    Then called Mom all excited that I might be living at Pewter Hill during Senior Project I got a tart lecture about Changing My Ways and Not Roaming the Halls At Night. (But I’ll have my own floor!)

    Came a cropper with Aynsley too who wants to “clean together”. Ugh! It is bad enough doing it all without someone watching me! (We already have white glove inspections!) How will I make it to June? I was hoping to get TB but it looks like that’s not going to happen. Uh oh, burned my finger with an illegal candle and serve me right.

    Sun 15 Oct 67
    Cured myself with a meal per to Philly where Casey and I saw Pinter’s magnificent Accident! Bogarde, Seyrig, York, Knox. What can I say! We were both overcome! Every scene was a mini-movie – the abandoned dining table. The broken car. Remaining in memory forever.


    Master Gwill brought me a pile of theatre books. Yay! Realized even though I am not happy there is no reason to be depressed. Dinner with Casey at the Nichols’ (pizza) where she is babysitting.

    11:40 PM
    Weird phone calls from “IBM Computer Research.” Both Aynsley and I talked to them till we got angry. Fishy. Suspect Dan’s roommates.

    Mon. 16 Oct 67
    3 gory chapters of Amos in Bible. Ripped up pregnant women, disturbed bones & general acts of O.T. vandalism. Feeling annoyed that this is presented to us as “philosophy”. Wrote my Bible paper on “Freedom & Discipline” about psychoanalysis and submitted it with considerable relish. Ha! We’ll see what he has to say about that!


    Enjoying NY Times Book Review about Games People Play. Agreeing with Dr. Berne about behaviorism. Freud says “personal fulfillment” as a goal is naïve.

    Try to talk about theatre with Master Gwill. He is rather slick and shallow and trying to maneuver me into a “liberal arts college” because “it is a very good thing.” Feel I’m being “indulged” so I can be “managed.” But he has the good idea of starting a hobby called Actors Seminar. I promised him I’d join.

    Dan called me at lunch at his most pathetic. Promised to send the other ticket. Who would I go with? I said Casey, wouldn’t that be appropriate? His ex-girlfriends out for the evening together! He said only if we talk about him. I said that’s guaranteed. Hung up the phone to Dropped Jaws on Girls’ End. Am I a monster or a role model? Thoughts are divided – it is neck and neck with disapproval having a SLIGHT edge. Just the way I like it.

    Reed and I teamed up in English together. I continually underestimate that boy but I think he underestimates himself. I was so afraid he’d sneer at my poetic talents but he performed my dialog with respect (he has yet to write his own.) And it’s about him! Still, he refuses to join Actors Seminar. We tried walking out of class together but we were out of step. Invited him to tea with my parents Parents Day if his aren’t coming. He says, “I hate tea.”

    I said, “Now I remember.”
    He said, “You think it’s the cure for everything.”
    I said, “It is.”
    He said, “To each his own escape
” Uh oh.
    Is that a yes or no?

    A Good Acting Exercise for Actors Seminar would be

    a) show you love someone without speaking or touching them.
    b) Same; someone you’re uncomfortable with


    Here’s my dialog:
    Girl: Persecuted recluse who likes to be nice to everyone in hopes of making friends. Plaintive.
    Boy: Young rebel caught up in the novelty of rebellion.
    Scene: The Varsity Hockey Field on Friday night. Girl’s attention drawn to Boy who is running around field whistling.
    G; Who’s that?
    B: What?
    G: Who are you, swooping around like that?
    B: It’s really fun. You should try it.
    G: Yes, but who are you?
    B: It’s only Clarence.
    G: Clarence do you feel all right?
    B: Yes.
    G: Then why are you swooping like that?
    B: Don’t call it swooping. Swooping is a coarse word.
    G: Oh, I’m sorry. It’s just the word that came to mind.
    B: If I don’t swoop it makes my head ache strangely.
    G: Maybe you should go to the infirmary.
    B: They can do nothing for me there.
    G: Oh well, then, I’ll leave you to you –
    B: Please don’t. Isn’t the moon wild tonight?
    G: You should see the lake! It looks like silver punch bowl of grape juice! And then when the moon went behind a cloud it looked like – I can’t remember what else it looked like. It was only seconds ago and yet I can’t remember.
    B: Maybe I should go look.
    G: No, it wouldn’t work.
    B: Why shouldn’t I look? I’ll go if you want.
    G: I’d rather swoop.
    (They swoop for a while.)
    G: I guess I just don’t have the technique.
    B: You look funny.
    G: Let’s go to the lake!
    B: No, it’s probably all gone by now.
    G: How could it be?
    B: Well, the part I didn’t tell you

    G: Are you drunk?
    B: Have you ever seen a drunk person walk this straight?
    G: No.
    (They walk awhile.)
    G: I don’t feel right. It’s like we’re on different wavelengths.
    B: Or planets.
    G: You don’t seem all there.
    B: Is anybody all there? Don’t you find this place emotionally stifling? Every once in awhile you’ve just got to get away.
    G: I go for a lot of walks but I still feel chained down.
    B: Yeah, I know what you mean.
    G: I wish we could go to the top of the hill and just take off.
    B: Fly away! Yeah, yeah!
    G: I’m so glad you understand me.
    B: Isn’t it a groove?
    G: I’ve been looking all my life for someone to understand me.
    B: This is like The Early Show. I just want to have fun. I’m not one who wants to go around understanding people. This whole evening is starting to feel like a bad trip. I’ll take an 8×12 cell to a neurotic girl any day.
    (Girl bursts into tears.) END

    Wed 18 Oct 67
    Devouring Freud voraciously. I am on the last chapter. Now to The Interpretation of Dreams which I won’t rest until I read.


    I had a dream myself last night. It was more of a nightmare. I was at a party wearing my RA t-shirt talking loudly about how much I hated Robin and how I never wanted to see him again. So when he emerged from the crowd I was frightened! He had a skull like death – his eyes were black pits – he was garishly made up with lots of rouge on his yellow-powdered face. His hair seemed stiff and dyed – I was terrified but I didn’t want to take back what I’d said. I backed right up into a closet – the last thing I saw was his arrestingly ugly face. He never spoke, touched me or changed expression – he was like a wax figure in a horror museum. The closet was very small with sliding doors like I used to have in my room at Brockton. Genevieve wrote “Alysse is a nothing” inside it for lack of a better insult.

    I know the dream went on and on but I forget it at that point.

    Interesting about closets! We played a lot of games in that closet and my memory – the smell of the wood, the shoes, etc – was perfect. I used to read The, Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in there just in case
The dream reawakened the small and I can smell it right now.

    According to Freud dreams are wish fulfillment. I don’t think so.

    DREAM OF FREUD’S WOLFMAN

    The window opens of its own accord.
    He’s catapulted forward; waked.
    Outside, the walnut tree is hung with wolves
    Each to its branch; they watch him

    Blankly. Stillness has its
    Consequence. They are fat
    As lambs ready for castration; round
    As dogs; white as mother’s underdrawers.


    Such tails! Thick tails
    Perked and listening!
    Blue snow rumples up the bedclothes; stiffens
    Into plaster. This sky leads nowhere.


    The child’s eyes are frozen like the window
    They do not close; this tree
    Is butchered at the crown; it will
    Not grow.


    The wind that frosts the room is welcome
    Stirring like a scream and like a scream
    It alters what it sees.
    The wolves levitate.


    What they know the child
    Must discover.


    By the way, now that I know what neurasthenia is, give me depression any day. Speaking of Freud Casey says Genevieve “resents” our mother. Like Electra! Must confess I love Mom a little more than Dad. Genevieve has always been the opposite.

    Sat on the hearth in Dr. Gilmour’s East Room seminar, wild rain lashing and thrashing outside, my back to the dying fire, wearing one of my Scottish knit wool dresses, dreaming I was a little girl again wearing a white nightgown with Princess Alysse embroidered on the shoulder, when who should appear but Reed, wet from the rain, his skin glowing. Gave him my place. Have I wronged that boy? Everyone thinks so.

    “Do I keep falling in love just for the kick of it,
    Stammering through the thin and the thick of it
    Hating each old, tired trick of it
    Know what I am? I’m good and sick of it!” (Sweet Charity.)

    Senior pictures a frightful mistake. I really need someone else’s, but whose? Jean Harlow, by choice.

  • Wild With Possibility: teen diaries of Alysse Aallyn

    Wed 20 Sept 67


    There are people in the world who think I have potential. Dan, for one. I was so grateful to him for the good things he said I almost cried. He called me last night during dinner and I was glad to hear from him, wondering what he did when he was here (I took a sleepover.) Said he visited Master Gwill and they discussed ME. Master Gwill says the reason people think I’m not honest is that I’m so honest! Thank you very much! Usually I can’t be bothered to lie – it makes me feel they’ve won. (Using Artful Measures usually fails dismally anyway.)

    Dan says his sister Janie disapproves of our dating. (Of course she does – she rooms with Marnie.)

    I love love LOVE George Bernard Shaw such a charming, reasonable man. His preface to St Joan is so delightful! Are there any other dramatists skilled at the expository style?

    Fri 22 Sept 67
    Why spoil love by turning it into Valhalla? Valhalla is for dead people. Every time a magazine article appears about Sick Sex Morals of Today’s Youth there’s an answering barrage of letters from housewives who are so Sorry for us for “giving up” the Sacred Night of Love with your Eternal, Glorious, God-Mandated Virginal Husband. It bothers me that they don’t realize calling your wedding day “the happiest day of your life” sounds more like a sentence than a reward. It’s all downhill after that is hardly a recommendation!

    I’ve got enough rules thank you very much. “I can’t send him a KOB till he sends me one” I can’t ask him till he asks me” I can’t kiss him till he kisses me” and I CERTAINLY can’t say I love him until he says he loves me! I don’t blame the senior boys for their rage over this mess, the problem is, inertia’s not an answer.

    Dan called me Thurs the fiftieth time this week. I called him back as “Juanita Devereux” (he says his frat brother think he’s married.) He was VERY depressed. I couldn’t think what else to say when he said nobody cared anything about him, I said I LOVE YOU. The deadest silence. (What an idiot I am.) Finally I asked, “Have you committed suicide?”
    “Did you mean what you just said?”


    Uh oh. I love you, I love my dog – we’re both grasping at straws here. I tried telling him that the wonderful way he has treated me has made me love him. He’s very lovable. ANYBODY WOULD LOVE HIM. I could tell it’s not quite what he wanted to hear.

    In Bible class we discussed what a shock it is to discover there is a world apart from your perceptions. If your perceptions are screwed up YOU COULD BE COMPLETELY WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING. True, too true. But does it MATTER? (Think of Van Gogh.)

    Fri 23 Sept 67
    Dan asked me to sleep with him! He says he has a doctor who will “work” with me. Uh oh. You know I don’t like mixing work & play! Plus I’m scared of pills – read a hideous article in the Ladies Home Journal. On the other hand Liesl Cahill has taken them for her skin for two years and they work great. She always remembers. (She hasn’t had sex though.)

    I told him so far I like the idea of foam. Supposedly 100% effective if you use it every time! Dan said it would be like “screwing a cream puff.” Is that so bad?

    I could do worse than Dan and I know it. He is gentle, he has experience, he is insanely in love with me. Unfortunately the whole Casey thing still bothers me. And I wouldn’t be able to date here. I’d be “taken”. And we wouldn’t even be seeing each other all that much! There’s just an aura of doom hovering over the whole thing. Frankly I was hoping for something different. I don’t like the thought of being punctured like a beer can. I’m so afraid I will “belong” to him I some irritatingly final way.

    We talked to one am and he asked what I was wearing. Blue and white striped nightshirt, pieds nu – and you?

    Only a pair of levis. Aaahh
bare chested. (He has a very nice chest.) God men’s chests are beautiful. When I am not around him though I feel shivers of ice cold doubt. Is it because I’m afraid he could “get” to me? That I couldn’t stay free? Don’t know. Dithering. I am afraid of revealing myself. I find myself very unwilling to go to his college. Now why’s that? I don’t want to experience it as “a girlfriend”. What if I am attracted by his roommates? (I can hear them laughing in the background when he’s on the phone.)

    Senior Pictures – attempting to maintain a Spiritual Expression forty-five seconds at a time is foul.

    Senior Class Party a cattle market. Wore the gold wool dress that matches my hair. We inspect each other for weapons & wounds. Reed asked me to dance! I said sure! He danced poorly but with great concentration. I kept up a smile rictus the whole time but we were both glad it was over. Whew! Danced with Ed, Chip and the rosy-cheeked English exchange student Rob Severn who said he DISLIKED the Doors! Who could dislike Light My Fire? It’s like hating Shakespeare – our Shakespeare.


    Danced with Reed one more time which I thought was unbelievably brave (he must be high.) He clearly hated the whole thing. He and Marnie cast weird looks at each other like they’d cooked something up together but maybe I’m hypersensitive. I hope he thinks of the good times we had.

    Casey cornered me on the Senior Stairs demanding to know how far Dan and I have gone. NOWHERE I said. (Didn’t mention his offer.) She tried to get me angry but I was humble. She doesn’t want to hurt me she only wants to hurt herself and I can sympathize. We were interrupted by a cry of Phone Call!

    She said, “It’s probably for you. It’s probably Dan.”

    It was for me. It was Dan. He asked if he’d “pulled me out of a party” (very cute when he’s jealous) I said I was talking to Casey. He said, “Christ!”

    I’d just seen Dial M for Murder the 2nd time – such a lovely movie! How I love the glitter in Ray Milland’s eyes, the velvet in his voice! Talked to Dan about it. I think Hitchcock’s my favorite. Don’t like Psycho that much but Vertigo and Rear Window are fabulous.

    He was depressed again. Cheered him up by singing “Willst du mit mir schlaffen, schlaffen” to the music of Jacob’s Ladder. (But my German is bad so then I have to sing, “Soldiers of the Lord.”) He laughed.

    He said one nice thing. His roommates asked what I was like and he said, “Very, very, beautiful.” Aaahh
 Way to a girl’s heart.

    I told him I would probably sleep with him “eventually”. It gave me such pleasure to say it. We can’t do it tomorrow or in NY so I have plenty of time to chicken out.

    1:00 AM
    I hug myself as I prowl the cold dark halls. Took two Copes but I don’t think they do anything. Aynsley’s bed is realistically stuffed with an Alibi since she has to be in McKenzie’s room or McKenzie would be alone. Blew through Norah Lofts’ The Concubine. I understand Anne so well – scheme and work for something for years, then undo it in a moment. If I walk enough, I can sleep.

    Mon 25 Sept 67
    Feeling constricted by my Insane Relationship with Dan. Couldn’t I choose a guy who gradated from a DIFFERENT prep school? This one knows everything about Him and me and seemingly by osmosis, Us. No, it isn’t very pretty what a town without pity etc. Freedom and pride, the two main things I’ve always worked for, seem completely absent. No pleasure either. This relationship can’t work because neither of us is willing to be the other’s “love toy.”


    I shouldn’t have told him I love him, it would have been truer to say I need him. Or would that be worse?


    I’d wish I had Casey’s amorality but I don’t want her memories. They torment her.
    Dan and I lay in the grass yesterday and I had to admit I didn’t want him. I didn’t WANT his body covering mine – I wanted to be alone in my bed reading the NY Times! I said, “Sorry, maybe I’m frigid.” Maybe I really am! (Definitely with him.) He said he felt like he’d been kicked in the crotch, lit a cigarette and tried to think. He wanted me to try anyway but No. I have to feel it. C’est moi, c’est tout.

    The truth is we aren’t as comfortable in each other’s presence as we are on the phone. It’s getting creepy now, him hanging around his alma mater. After lunch he talked to Casey half an hour but told me later, “Nothing is solved.”

    He said he’s been too abrupt, he needs to forget his own pain and he would wait for me “forever and ever.” This is NOT what I wanted to hear. I said, “I don’t think we’re right for each other” which was not what HE wanted to hear. Impasse. When he left he said whatever makes me happy makes him happy. Here’s the problem with that: I’m not happy.

    Vespers calculated to “lift me higher” – moody Germanic music. Reed came onstage with his usual purposeful lope. Spoke well – I was surprised. Must have forsworn the Evil Weed. Spoke about the ARTIFICIALITY of the PLUMLY DATING SCENE. He is very dismissive of artificial markers. KOBS are just “pieces of paper.” A grade is just a “piece of paper”. A driver’s license is just a “piece of paper”. A marriage license is
you guessed it. This does not cut much ice with Me, the Archivist! I whirl in paper most days like a gerbil in a nest and I like it that way. I think paper is REALER THAN WE ARE. (Because it outlives us.) So there.

    Dan called Mon, pulling me out of lunch. He always calls at meals, presumably to starve me into thinness. It won’t work – I can eat through nausea, interruptions, anything. I have a hoard of revolting “emergency” sugar cookies in a lockbox beneath my bed. I told him to call me at nine.
    He called me at nine. He just wants to be my friend and love me from a distance and give me things. I should NEVER have told him I loved him but I was wild for affection. Now our relationship is absolutely ruined. I made him promise to stop saying he loves me and stop saying I’m beautiful. Not how friends talk.

    He agreed! Wow! He really must love me. There is no kindness greater than the kindness of someone who eases your fear.

    Sun 1 Oct 67
    Revolution in the soul. The hurt we inflict on others is our own hurt, caused by our chains. Girls have been taught to make themselves as attractive as a dinner or a piece of jewelry and the number of broken men grasping after them is a mark of success. I can no longer look at fashion magazines. Glamour sickens me. Our souls are in rags. Feeling horribly guilty about Dan but I can’t imagine how to fix it. Angry that a perfectly healthy seventeen year old girl has to torment herself with the demon of frigidity just to make him feel better. (All the guys say I’m “cold’.)


    Poor Genevieve! Mom gave me her ruthless scorching letter in which she accused Mom & Dad of being “schizophrenic”. (She’s studying psychology at school.) I agreed with Mom that a daughter shouldn’t talk to her mother that way (it sounded like she was writing a paper) on the other hand Mom shouldn’t be showing it to ME! And they do want two PERFECTLY IMPOSSIBLE things from us. For instance I can’t get over the notion that Mom wants me to fail in order to prove herself right. (She says I go about everything the exactly wrong way. But if you want to run your own life what other way is there? Her argument seems to be shut down your brain and let others take over!

    Dan and I were in the train station Sat night surrounded by other couples. I felt you could judge the “success” of each of their dates simply by looking at them. Variations on hope & distance – trying to “feel together”. Bloody hard. Feel I’ll never have “a date” again. My mind will be rushing to “the ending”. How can I flirt and show myself off? I will be like a crone from a Depression era play moaning, Doom, doom! I don’t want reality any more!

    Reed in the infirmary. When I went down to have my TB shot checked I asked if I could say “hi” the nurse agreed but said darkly, “Be quick about it. And no carrying on!” She then said he NEEDS a visitor because he keeps his eyes shut and his lights off.

    I knocked on his door in case he was sleeping and he said, “Yes”.
    He has such a nice voice.


    “May I come in?”
    Didn’t identify myself.

    He looked so young and pathetic with his hair messed up wearing a hospital gown.

    I sat down on the other bed so nervous I was speechless. Kept remembering that horrible scene win the library with Shawn which answers the question YES you CAN make things worse!
    I ran my fingers over his guitar wishing I had the nerve to ask him to play. Asked if he was getting poetry out of this experience, he said he hadn’t thought about it. He was very polite – I was relieved – Shawn is a skilled cross-examiner and Reed is not. He is more natural. I said we were all worried about him. He thanked me for coming.

    I left feeling confident that he is not my enemy. Shawn on the other hand



    Had to wait a whole hour for Dan at the 69th st. station but I had a book. Then we immediately went shopping. It is sad, I feel no desire for him at all. Where did it go? We both want to know.
    He bought champagne and cognac so he can make French 75s back at Villanova. Then said he wanted to go to the book dept where he was embarrassed to have me see him buying a book Mixing Drinks. He is shamed by not knowing everything! I say we don’t have to bother memorizing things if we have enough books!

    Arrived at the Penn St house 4 pm, Mom forgot to leave a key but the landlady was in. I made us bacon & eggs and tea with oranges, then left him downstairs with a magazine while I took a long, glorious bath. DID NOT WANT TO GET OUT OF THAT BATHTUB.


    Dressed in my “Thanksgiving dress” might as well – he might not get another chance to see it. Called Aynsley to see if my shike had gone as planned – she signed me in & out without a hitch. (She spent the whole day shiking in Media!)

    Dan and I took the train into Philly and saw Privilege. I love cinema veritĂ©! The principal actors were not extraordinary but the supporting cast was outstanding! “Britain in the Near Future” only 5 yrs from now! Not just possible but realistic.

    After the movie, dancing at the Trauma. Dan was so depressed I am starting to get irritated with him. People were packed in tight to hear the Youngbloods but Mandrake Memorial played first. I remembered them from Junior Wells days! They weren’t as bad as I recalled. Jesse Colin Young is electrifying! He has such a mellow, sleepy, hypnotic voice. I fell in love with him right there (I’m afraid Dan could tell.) “I hope he won’t look at you twice” he said nervously. (We were right up front.) They are as good as the Blues Project. But there were really too many people and we had to leave. I was getting claustrophobia from having Dan’s hands all over me.

    On the way home we talked it out well. Somehow I dredged up the courage to tell him I’m just not ready in my life. I didn’t say something about his life is putting me off because what good would that do? But he insisted on spending the night with me in the other twin bed.
    Very chaste! He still wanted to talk but I drank a glass of water and fell asleep immediately.
    The alarm woke us at 4:30. I pretended to be asleep in the subway so I wouldn’t have to make conversation. He liked having my head on his shoulder.

    At 69th street he didn’t expect me to kiss him so just a hurried goodbye. Brrr! Walking from Milltown to Plumly at 7:15 AM on a Sunday morning is a glorious experience! Birds singing, etc. I was on time for chapel. Noticed Reed was out of the infirmary. I gave a reading saying it is not the POINT that matters but the pursuit of the point while Miss Beeston nodded her head uncontrollably (she “agrees” with everything now.) Down to the Crypt to pick up my NY Times. Then slept the light week of the wicked. “We are but a moment’s sunlight, fading on the grass
”

    11:25 PM Wed 4 Oct 67
    Lonely. It’s feast or famine around here and what food there is, is none too good. Waves of contempt from Shawn & Reed whenever I run into them. But Ted, Kip and new student from Kenya Bob Burke being very nice to me.

    Aynsley HATES when I keep the lights on (and candles are illegal) so I’m under the covers with a flashlight again. I die for sleep all day then when night comes I could not be more awake.
    In two months I will be 18 – an adult. Called Mom last night (because I can’t call Dan) and said Cheer me up. (Dan called Casey to tell her to tell me not to call him any more! How you can misjudge people!) Mom didn’t do a very good job (she wants to hear my “plans”) but I was able to disguise my tears. I seem to have reached a jumping off place in my life. One shouldn’t have to apologize for change as if it was a weakness.


    Casey and I in detention together because we went for a walk bra-less to the lake! How we wanted to penetrate that smooth dark mirror! So we did
after a few moments in became quite warm. Then we lay on the dock with our soaking hair. Even shivers were welcome!


    When I got back a KOB from Simon Matthews asking me to Fall Dance. It’s imperative that I accept or I’m sunk around here. He’s in the Kobler-Hambro clique! So at least he has the ability to think for himself. He seems nice enough but I wish I could do the choosing. I wonder I it’s because I nominated him to be School Day Art Teacher (he’s good at art.) He got it too.


    Got a letter from Dan saying the exact reverse of what he said in his phone call to Casey – that he is getting tickets to The Homecoming (Pinter) because he knows I want to see it so much!
    So I don’t know what to do. I DO want to see it so much!

    “Je suis allĂ© au marchĂ© aux a la feraille
    Et j’ai achetĂ© des chaĂźnes, les chaĂźnes pour toi
”

    A weird sick letter from Robin! Says he will write again when he gets out of the Navy! Oh, please spare me his militarized self!

    Feel like maybe now I could sing myself to sleep
 “I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in and keeps my mind from wandering
where it will go
” with my luck if I fall asleep there will be a fire drill.

  • Wild With Possibility: teen diaries of Alysse Aallyn

    Plumly School, Thurs. 14 Sept 67


    Some damn bell went off at 6:55 and I propped open my frozen eyes stuck fast with wedding cake. Having a horrible sex dream about George Hamilton. Who was I really dreaming about?

    “L’ombre parmi les ombres,
    D’ĂȘtre cent fois plus ombre que l’ombre
    D’ĂȘtre l’ombre qui viendra et reviendra
”

    Just like old times staggering to the Tower and standing in line for a washbasin. This being a senior business hasn’t helped me so far. Feel as if I’ve been here for 400 years. If I had a diamond I’d scratch on the window: Quoth Alysse, ye Prisonniere” but the best I’ve got is an amethyst.

    Come to think of it I could use my record needle. This is what geology teaches. Admit I enjoy senior stairs & bench in chapel.

    Dressed in old clothes – everyone wearing new so I couldn’t possibly outclass them. Best approach is build up slowly. New black tweed dress a bit too classy for ordinary day plus the skirt will give Miss Womrath her well-deserved heart attack. Seems only Christian to toughen the old bird up slowly before we spring the scary stuff.

    Miss Beeston wearing a LITERAL BEEHIVE (there’s something living in there) gave Collection but I forgot about my New Leaf and did not listen. I am sitting at Mrs. Kurtz’s table, which is very sad. She is the one who uses conversation cards and says We Must Hold Up Our End. Why, oh why? How can an eight-person dining table have so many ends? Can’t we take turns napping?
    Right after Grace I thundered over to the coffee table for the Mississippi Mud that is due me. It isn’t good but we have to pretend – “holding up our end” for the wide-eyed freshman who think we are all hard-drinking sluts. (Hope we are.)

    2nd cup of coffee who should I slam into but Reed! He is taller and much better looking. I could tell he knew it was me by the way his neck froze. I said Hi, he mumbled good morning and staggered away. He’s probably on drugs; that was always his Senior Plan. He’s doing his thesis on Aldous Huxley.

    Saw my little bro last night but little sis has yet to make an appearance. Probably slashed her wrists when she discovered her family’s plans to inter her here. And who can blame her? It’s true the place is co-ed but the only thing worse than dating is not dating. All part of their clever plan to break our spirit. Sent my little bro a KOB full of cryptic quotes for him to puzzle over.
    Aynsley & I had fun arranging our room. Looks less bad with tie-dyed bedspreads & Doors & Byrds posters. To everything there is a season

    Little sis showed up, I gave her a door sign with a big wicker fan chair saying “Meet Maris Wicker” on it. Seems a good kid. She is very musical.

    Shawn said he had a great summer “spiritually.” Seems ominous. Dan is now saying he is in love with me, probably to keep me from dating. This is all my fault for playing footsie with him under the table when he had dinner at our house. His roommate asked him, “How much have you gotten?”

    “Nothing.”

    “Nothing! And you’re snowed already!”

    Junior Wells did the exact same show he did in Boston. At least he’s good to dance to.
    Prospects? Only Kip’s face lights up when I sit beside him on Senior Bench.

    Last night saw A Man and a Woman with Aynsley, her sister and her sister’s husband. It was just terrific! Music really gets under your skin!

    “Samba without sadness is a wine that can’t get you drunk,” says Pierre Barouh.

    Coffee afterwards with grads from Claudia’s year who have joined a cult called The Temple! They are sadly changed but think they are improved. I think if you look and act like you’ve had a lobotomy it is guaranteed not a good spiritual experience. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with Shawn. Must ask.

    Sat. 16 Sept 67
    Dr. Gilmour handed out axioms in philosophy and asked if they were true or false. Biff Withers & I are the only ones who said “true” to THE LAWS OF NATURE GOVERN EVERYTHING. I argued humans are “natural” ergo everything we think & do is “natural.” If there were Martians, they would be “natural” too. Screams all around. Dan says he is planning to sleep with me. I’m thinking about it. Aynsley says senior boys are Not Dating so I could be desperate. But things are getting a bit sticky with Casey, who should be “done” with Dan and also not caring because we haven’t technically “done” anything. She insists she doesn’t “want” him any more but she also insults my pride by saying he is only doing this because of her. To get back at her, I guess and I am too irritated to argue because anything I could say would only make things worse. I quote the Stones “Just tryin’ to make a connection” but she is not impressed.

    Dan, Dan, Dan, what am I going to do about you? It’s nice having someone “care” even if they are far away. But
he sent me a bottle of 4711 and a Racing America t-shirt. I like good presents a lot more than Playboy cards or letters where he talks about what an “ideal couple” we will be the “great novelist and the great actress.” What if I want to write novels? I don’t like being typecast!

    Speaking of connections I keep running into Shawn but I am waiting for him to make the first move (or I am guaranteed to disgrace myself.) Last night we had a Square Dance in the New Gym. Scavenger hunts (which we usually have) are more fun but I went anyway and lo and behold who should be there but Shawn. Reed looked in wearing his green plaid lumberjack coat – then left. (Trying not to be insulted.) Shawn was administering the ice cream table and I helped him, fantasizing about a pleasant, emotionally uninvolved yet friendly year. He tried to talk to me but faculty members kept coming up – it just wasn’t a good scene. Still I didn’t like his “air”. Felt repressive. He COULD send me a KOB and he hasn’t so I should read the writing on the wall and slip away. Stuck with Kip whose deep doggy eyes scare me. He is very smart; tall enough, a little on the thin side, handsome, blond – it ought to be cool. But there is a weirdness about him I feel screams “danger.” Could be I am seeing the reflection of my own weirdness in his eyes! Aren’t we in trouble then!

    Constant interruptions from underclassmen bringing in their door signs for my signature – making this hard to write. Think authors should remain unknown.

    Also spent all morning taking “Gramm’s tests” I think they are called which are horrendous “right answer” tests where you have to display, among other things, your knowledge of “correct” tennis court construction! This literally makes me foam at the mouth. It has nothing whatever to do with intelligence and really tests how meek, unquestioning and malleable you are. Shudder. Aynsley tells me not to get hysterical, give them what they want. If I gave them what they want would I be virgo intacta after all these months?

    Moving letter from Merrill about Mom, very wise and forgiving. She sets such high standards for herself, if we fall short she blames herself. Then why is she mean to us? Feels babyish to me but I get that Merrill is being understanding and generous. The more you love someone the more you want to struggle with them in my experience. Being “forgiven” is totally the kiss of death.

    Reading Kafka’s The Castle. Mann calls him a “religious humorist” which seems all wrong to me. This is a bureaucracy allegory.

    It’s now 2:30 and we seniors must rehearse our skit for Camp Suppers this evening. We are doing Ali Baba and the 40 thieves. Aujourd’hui c’est toi.

    Poem from Dan-

    Words Are Such Liars
    Sitting on the roof
    The other night
    wind ruffled my memories
    made my eyes wet.
    Trying to write a poem
    Definition destroys delight.
    Could speech ease the pressing thing within me
    Bridge the distance
    Or should I bribe the silent future
    Touch your silken skin & hair?

    This is the poem that made Casey cry. I tried to tell her one cannot feel
    complimented by a very bad poem.

    Sun 17 Sept 67 – 11 PM
    Definitely one of the worst days of my life. A sick, sad, whipped feeling. Feel like I may “give in” to Dan and say I love him if he wants me to say it. Evicted from tennis. Heard that “trying to be friendly” with Reed means “I want him back”. Says everyone. I can’t totally deny it. Do I? Depends how he acts! On everything! People being real for two seconds at a time!
    Sat night I sent him his Blues Project record back with short KOB.

    “You can call me from a snow white, starlit stairway
    I may hear and not be far away at all
    But the sounds of our winter’s love at night time
    They have vanished
they have silenced
” (Steve’s song)

    In chapel I sat directly across from Shawn on the Facing Bench. He looked so smugly beautiful, so big, magnificent and male. He has a perfect profile. Raincoat over pajamas, I sat muttering in my own filth. Picking my face. Boredom like an anguish. Back at the dorm Dan calls, tried to make me jealous with all the girls he took out this weekend, want to come next weekend. Here! I babbled that would be way too hard for me. Blaming Casey would be the easy way out. I don’t know what to do. I’ll have to take a sleepover.

    Read Blues for Mister Charlie. It ripped me up inside but we can’t perform it – write a “white” version? Possibly.

    Realized I am not a leader. Listening to them babble about rules and administration at senior play meeting in the library I see why Shawn and I can’t converse. I even hate team sports, so my loathing of the group dynamic runs deep. I used to be a Transcendentalist but now I think I am an anarchist. Shawn wanted to talk afterwards. I asked why he’s avoiding me! Said he’d met a girl this summer who showed how superficial our relationship had been! I flinch when he and Reed use exactly the same words about me!!! I know they’ve been talking!!! I asked him if a man feels like a success to himself but everyone else thinks he’s a failure, what is he?

    Shawn says “a success.”


    But if a girl thinks she’s not a bitch and everyone else thinks she is



    “She’s a bitch.” He says.


    I cry unfair! Said I was sorry for the impression he has of me but I couldn’t correct it.
    He said, “What impression do I have of you?”

    Fortunately I was crying too hard to even ATTEMPT to answer that question.
    Tonight a “Thank you – buzz off” KOB from Reed!

    I should feel better “having” Dan, says Aynsley. But I don’t “have” him. People don’t have other people (especially me and Dan.) Made myself feel better by buying a Thanksgiving dress from McKenzie. $5. Barely used. Short, black velvet with exotic lace sleeves. Seemed more like “Dan’s dress” than mine; a weird experience of looking at myself from the outside-in – triggered by Shawn’s sarcastic, cruel expression. At least Dan doesn’t mind when I cry around him – if that’s how life makes me feel. Depend on NY Times & tea to right all wrongs.


    Casey talking angrily about me with the other girls. Miss Beeston insists, “You are what you seem.” That can’t be true. I know Thoreau & Emerson are on my side.