Date: Monday, 9/8/69

My first day of classes got off to a rocky start.

Here I am sitting in my dorm room again. I could see people hooking up for coffee after classes. They went to the Commons and the noise was so loud that I had to come back up here. Sylvie must think I never leave the room.

This first day threw me that’s for sure. Well, it was really just one class that made me feel this way. When you know, as I do, that you’re the pet project of a couple of your high school teachers and if they saw what happened today they would wonder why they poured all their energy into you, well . . .

I’m really not angry. Nor am I ungrateful. I know it took my hard work too to get me into this place. The two of them played a significant role in helping me. I feel like I am now on the road to disappointing them.

I sat through this first day of classes and wondered what Miss Fromm and Mrs. Wald were thinking of. What would they do if they were me?

My assessment is this: When it comes to purely academic classes like the psychology and philosophy classes, I am a whiz kid. My two other classes aren’t as certain when it comes to my abilities as a student. Or, in the case of Dr. Fish’s poetry class, my perceived abilities. Or my innate inabilities due to my feminine nature.

Mrs. Wald might know what to say to someone like Dr. Fish, but she isn’t here. Both of them were great when it came to coaching me for the interview. We sat for hours and we had a good time doing it. They asked serious questions but then they would ask just plain silly ones to help me relax and enjoy myself.

Dr. Fish would never understand that kind of student/teacher relationship because he is aptly named Dr. Fish. Or as I am now dubbing him—old fuck face. Yes, I can be like this here in my room and in my diary, but in person, he is as awful as his name sounds.

It could not have been a worse start to our class than for him to say, as he did, that no woman, not one, is capable of writing or understanding poetry. I am not making this up. I heard him say those very words. He intimidated me, the way he stood in front of the class and counted the number of women sitting there. It was like he couldn’t stand the fact of us being there.

When I learned how to dissect a fish in Miss Fromm’s biology class, I never knew that I might be fantasizing doing it on a human.

The nagging question in the back of my head is this: What if he fails me and I lose my scholarship?

I could barely put those words on this page. Nor can I keep up this attitude of being so smart and it will all turn out to be okay.

I returned from classes and went to the bathroom and threw up right away. I didn’t care who was in there, I had no time to care.

As I recovered from throwing up, I imagined two options. The first was I could run away. The second is I could pretend to be someone else. I’d still have to be a girl but maybe if I weren’t me who was so scared, I’d do okay.

Why do they let him teach here?

Okay, Scags, you’ve got to stop this complaining because then there is the other class you know you will have trouble with but for other reasons.

In the pottery class that Prof. Keating insisted I take, I am up against something else I’m not sure of. I wanted to be in an art history class, but no, he placed me in a studio arts class. I’m not an artist. I don’t know anything about throwing pots, I didn’t even know that was what one did or called it. At least Prof. Calderon is a nicer person and so much better to look at than Dr. Fish.

I can only tackle one big problem at a time. Prof. Calderon may be easier to talk to than Dr. Fish will ever be. I felt so out of place there. It was more than just the content of the class—the throwing pots—it had to do with the way she walked around the class talking to us. So personal in a way I have never seen before. I didn’t know how to respond to it at all.

After dinner, I’ll go to the library. At least there I know what to do and feel competent. I think I should wait until the end of the week to run away. Maybe by then I will have calmed down.