1951
7:30 p.m. Wednesday, October 17 –
I don’t know why I should be so hideously gloomy, but I have that miserable “nobody-loves-me” feeling. I’ve been up here in the infirmary for a day and a half, now, and really my head feels much better, not so stuffed and all. But still I feel very shaky, especially when I get up, from all the pills they’ve given me, maybe. Tomorrow I get up for my first written which I’ve stupidly put off studying for by reading old New Yorker magazines. Also I’ve got a luncheon date with somebody from Mademoiselle, who’s meeting all the thousands of girls who want to enter the College Board Contest. I can’t think of a thing to wear. All my clothes are brown, navy or velvet. No matching accessories. Hell, how I’ve piddled off money, penny by penny, for unmatching items. How can I expect to criticize the country’s leading fashion mag when I can’t even dress correctly myself? To top it off, I’ve just talked to mother over the phone, and made her unhappy, Dick unhappy, me unhappy. Instead of whizzing off for a gala weekend Friday, with Carol, for Dick, clinic, party at HMS,1 etc., I languish. Not even really sick up here, which I could bear. No. I could go home if I wanted too. But it would be a strain on my health & my academic work. As is, I’m shaky. I’ve two weeks back work to catch up on. It’s the “best thing” as far as common sense is concerned to go to bed early Saturday night, to work all weekend. But heck, I keep thinking of me dancing with Dick in my black velvet, and meeting his fascinating friends … oh, well. Brace up. Build up your body and be ready to meet the next party, the next boy, the next weekend with renewed strength. As it is now, I’m too well to be really ill and pampered, too groggy to make being up worthwhile. Siniusitis plunges me in manic depression. But at least the lower I go the sooner I’ll reach bottom & start the upgrade againt.
12 Friday –
Now all this dolorousness may be normal, being as I just got out of the infirmary today and still carry a head packed full of mucous, leaving me groggy and shaken. But suddenly all my courses are way out of hand – I’ve missed too much, and am at least a week behind in all of them. Not only that, I don’t know whether or not I’ll be on Press Board, or whether I can sell stockings in my spare time, which I haven’t any of. Then too, how will I ever find time to work at the mental hospital? I am torn by a desire to really get to know the girls in my house – and chat and play bridge now & then. But worst of all, I have this terrible responsibility of being an A-student (everybody labels me as such – what hollow mockery!) and I don’t see how I can keep up my front. Last year, at least, I had two easy courses. This year government2 has thrown me completely – Freshman are brightly articulate in section. Religion is demanding – I am a week behind, fouled up my first written. In art, I’ve missed a good 10 hours work. No matter how much time I spend over there, I’ll never get above a B- my most optimistic mark. My English lit course is plainly above me unless I go to seminars & read lots of extra stuff. My creative writing course demands what I love – work and time. But how to combine weekends with Dick, intense work, sociability and, above all, health? God knows. Now I know why Ann left. How can I ever think with this load of hard mucous in my head? Where is my strength coming from?
6 Friday – Letter from Constantine! Fate, fate! Now to soaring, now to the heights! Will I become the wife of a handsome dark haired Russian oil magnate-to-be?? And what of the blonde Greek God cutting cadavers in the heart of Boston? Life, life, where is thy sting!
She is about thirty-two years old, and you wouldn’t bother noticing her features unless she started talking to you about herself, which she did. You see, I’m on the second floor of the infirmary, and except for two basal metabolism cases that came in for the morning3 I’m the only girl up here. They say they keep the second floor for colds; they’re adding on a new wing down the other end of the hall, and I can hear the hammering from where I sit on the sun deck. One of the men came into my room yesterday to help the nurse catch a wasp. His name was Victor, and he was a cheerful gray little fellow in blue overalls that were too big for him. He kept telling me about how wasps wouldn’t sting you if you didn’t bother them, and the nurse kept laughing and saying how one wasp flew right at her and stung her face without her even getting near it.
Well anyhow, like I started out to say, this day nurse came in for the first time this morning to take my temperature and to give me my inhalation. So while she was making the bed she laughed to herself as though remembering something special and awfully funny. So I asked her what she was laughing at and she said it was about how her boyfriend was wearing leather shoes last night and slipped on the stairs of the Valley Arena with two glasses of beer. Did he spill, I asked. Only a little on her suit and she didn’t mind, she said. Then she started talking about how she changed nursing schools and didn’t finish her three year course but was taking an 18 month course that had everything but the operating room only she didn’t tell the students about it because they might lose confidence. We were looking at a cartoon book, and she laughed and said about how one picture reminded her of seeing her first delivery. She didn’t want to be there watching, so she always hid in a room washing instruments or something, but this time the head nurse made her stand right where she couldn’t walk away or anything. And then she remembered how they used to watch bodies being cut up, and she said how her mother hadn’t ever told her anything about how men looked, so when the doctor began to take off the sheet and cut off tissue after tissue she went and gagged in a shocked tone, and everybody turned and looked at her. Her mother ought to have told her something first, seeing as she even had brothers.
Then she told about how she had something wrong with her left eye and no one in her family would back her up to have an operation on it. Finally her aunt in New York told her to, and she went to the doctor. The second time he cut her eye he did it too much and so when she looked she had double vision and that was bad because of crossing streets. So the doctor said if she’d let him cut once more he fix it, and she did. Now when she looks at you with her brown eyes you think she’s staring over your head until you see how her right eye is really fixed on you after all. Did it hurt you, I asked. She said they only gave her novacaine and nembutal so she could still be wide awake enough to turn her head at the right time.
What’s your boy friend like, I asked her then. Oh, Joe, she said. Last night he got real romantic. And she bridled, her head to one side and her chin stuck back into her neck with a silly toothy grin. I noticed that her teeth were crowded one in front of the other, real close together. She had good big breasts though, and they bulged up under the starched sexless white uniform so you could see how some guy might want to get real romantic. How did you meet him, I asked, thinking that if she would talk that question would do it. It did.
She met him at a square dance. Grace and Jane got her to go on her Saturday night off and said, who knows, Betty, you might meet some nice fella. So she was standing waiting for a square to begin when this guy walks up to her and asks her to be his partner. Oh, no, she says to herself, you’re too old for me. Well, she never squaredanced before, so he took her up to the loft and showed her a few steps. She smiles to herself and tells how he asked where she lived first and then when she was off. She started going out with him, and it seemed like he was divorced and had two kids. One was with the mother, and the other little girl was with him. She was eight years old, and had trouble with her feet. The only thing was, she was being brought up a Polish Nationalist which is like the Catholic belief, only the Poles allow their priests to marry.
Joe was awful considerate, but still you’ve got to be careful of these married men and their emotions; they’re kind of wary about getting married again, so you’ve got to make sure just what they’re planning. Joe wouldn’t get married till his mother died anyway, because she’s only given a year more to live. And now after his brother died just last week it was hardly decent to go planning anything like that. Still, it would be only five weeks more that Betty could stay up here, and it would be so nice if the two of them could take a cottage down the beach for a week just by themselves.
It was a funny thing, but they’d had pictures of Joe’s brother’s funeral taken since the sick mother couldn’t get out of bed. Betty was having them developed, but she really wished they wouldn’t come out because she didn’t want to have to look at them. As a matter of fact, Joe’s brother didn’t really die, but he committed suicide. Shot himself in the abdomen. So that’s why they kept the funeral pretty quiet. He must have had a lot of pain after he did it; it showed in his face.
Why did he do it, I wonder, I asked. Well, he left six kids and a sick wife in the hospital. Seems he’d lost his job, and when he got another he’d figured he couldn’t support them all being as they were living in a tenement anyway. Some people can take just so much and no more. Betty didn’t know her, but it seemed like the wife was the sort of woman who made a lot out of every little ache and pain. She had ulcers on her legs from having so many children in a row. Well, take six kids from one to ten years old and figure it out. A kid every year or two, just about. Joe’s brother looked awful old, about sixty, and him only thirty-five. So now he’s dead, and Joe really shouldn’t leave town for a week or two. Even if Betty would like to go to the shore for a week. It would be so nice, and they might even take the kid along, only they couldn’t have as much fun that way. So they could get a double cottage – you’ve got to be so careful when you’re single.
So she’d wait till July before she’d push the issue about getting married. After all, it’s a man’s job to do the asking.
Then the supervising nurse came in and said, “Miss. Gill,4 will you take switchboard duty from one to two.” Miss Gill hadn’t heard the stealthy antiseptic approach of the official white soft-soled shoes, so she broke off saying how she kind of liked Joe being as she’d been going with him for two years. She became very subservient and official, pouring a glass of thick syrupy cough medicine, and picking up crumpled kleenex. She said, “Yes, of course,” and bustled out of the room, her breasts jiggling softly under the starched white bib of her uniform.