April 1951

It is fortunate, fortunate indeed that this man called Cohen⁴² stands on the lecture platform, and that his nasal voice crackles against my eardrums, and that his words and his astringent wit trickle down the cerebral creases of my understanding. It is fortunate, fortunate indeed, that pictures of old movie stills are flashed upon the twilit screen to lacquer the retina of my eye which notates, around the edge, the dim heads and the murmurs of these girls.

One girl looks around; the planes of her shaded face advance and recede again behind her hair. I am I, with all the individuality of an earthworm. After a rain, who knows the unique pink worm by the twist of its elastic segments. Only the guts of the worm know. And it is nothing to crush the yellow liquid intestines under a casual heel.

Two hours, after that, of Botany,⁴³ and the slow tedium of rusty scalpels scraping clumsily on moss and blindly twirling lenses and knitting in between the languid sight of protococcus, and the dry factual volley of information from the loose fleshy mouth of the instructor. When he bends over the microscope before you, you trace the purple clusters of capillaries under the coarse porousness of his skin, striped with short bristly hairs and rutted where loose creases swing flabbily from his neck and jowls. “Here at the end of the pointer is a protonema with buds on it.” Here at the end of the pointer is a sick and squirming human intestine.

June 15, 1951

The rain comes down again, on the indecently big green leaves, and there is the wet hiss of drops splashing and puckering the flat veined vegetable surfaces. Although the rain is neutral, although the rain is impersonal, it becomes for me a haunting and nostalgic sound. The still air of the house smells of warm stagnant human flesh and of onions, and I sit, back to the radiator, the metal ribs of it pressing against my shoulders. I am in my old room once more, for a little, and I am caught in musing – – how life is a swift motion, a continuous flowing, changing, and how one is always saying goodbye and going places, seeing people, doing things. Only in the rain, sometimes, only when the rain comes, closing in your pitifully small radius of activity, only when you sit and listen by the window, as the cold wet air blows thinly by the back of your neck – only then do you think and feel sick. You feel the days slipping by, elusive as slippery pink worms, through your fingers, and you wonder what you have for your eighteen years, and you think about how, with difficulty and concentration, you could bring back a day, a day of sun, blue skies and watercoloring by the sea. You could remember the sensual observations that made that day reality, and you could delude yourself into thinking – almost – that you could return to the past, and relive the days and hours in a quick space of time. But no, the quest of time past is more difficult than you think, and time present is eaten up by such plaintive searchings. The film of your days and nights is wound up tight in you, never to be re-run – and the occasional flashbacks are faint, blurred, unreal, as if seen through falling snow. Now, you begin to get scared. You don’t believe in God, or a life-after-death, so you can’t hope for sugar plums when your non-existent soul rises. You believe that whatever there is has got to come from man, and man is pretty creative in his good moments – pretty mature, pretty perceptive for his age – how many years is it, now? How many thousands? Yet, yet in this era of specialization, of infinite variety and complexity and myriad choices, what do you pick for yourself out of the grab-bag? Cats have nine lives, the saying goes. You have one; and somewhere along the thin, tenuous thread of your existence there is the black knot, the blood clot, the stopped heartbeat that spells the end of this particular individual which is spelled “I” and “You” and “Sylvia.” So you wonder how to act, and how to be – and you wonder about values and attitudes. In the relativism and despair, in the waiting for the bombs to begin, for the blood (now spurting in Korea, in Germany, in Russia) to flow and trickle before your own eyes, you wonder with a quick sick fear how to cling to earth, to the seeds of grass and life. You wonder about your eighteen years, ricocheting between a stubborn determination that you’ve done well for your own capabilities and opportunities … that you’re competing now with girls from all over America, and not just from the hometown: and a fear that you haven’t done well enough – You wonder if you’ve got what it takes to keep building up obstacle courses for your self, and to keep leaping through them, sprained ankle or not. Again the refrain, what have you for your eighteen years? And you know that whatever tangible things you do have, they cannot be held, but, too, will decompose and slip away through your coarse-skinned and death-rigid fingers. So you will rot in the ground, and so you say, what the hell? Who cares? But you care, and somehow you don’t want to live just one life, which could be typed, which could be tossed off in a thumbnail sketch = “She was the sort of girl.…” And end in 25 words or less. You want to live as many lives as you can … you’re a capitalist from way back … and because you’re eighteen, because you’re still vulnerable, because you still don’t have faith in yourself, you talk a little fliply, a little too wisely, just to cover up so you won’t be accused of sentimentality or emotionalism or feminine tactics. You cover up, so you can still laugh at yourself while there’s time. And then you think of the flesh-and-blood people you know, and wonder guiltily where all this great little flood of confidence is getting you. (That’s the pragmatic approach – – – where are you getting? what are you getting? Measure your precepts and their values by the tangible good you derive from their use.) Take the grandparents, now. What do you know about them? Sure, they were born in Austria, they say “cholly” for “jolly” and “ven” for “when”. Grampy⁴⁴ is white-haired, terribly even-tempered, terribly old, terribly endearing in his mute and blind admiration of everything you do. (You take a bitter and rather self-righteous pride in the fact that he’s a steward at a Country Club.) Grammy is spry, with a big fat bosom and spindly arthritic legs. She cooks good sour cream sauce and makes up her own recipes. She slurps her soup, and drops particles of food from her plate down the front of her dresses. She is getting hard of hearing, and her hair is just beginning to turn gray. There is your dead father who is somewhere in you, interwoven in the cellular system of your long body which sprouted from one of his sperm cells uniting with an egg cell in your mother’s uterus. You remember that you were his favorite when your were little, and you used to make up dances to do for him as he lay on the living room couch after supper. You wonder if the absence of an older man in the house has anything to do with your intense craving for male company and the delight in the restful low sound of a group of boys, talking and laughing. You wish you had been made to know Botany, Zoology and Science when you were young. But with your father dead, you leaned abnormally to the “Humanities” personality of your mother. And you were frightened when you heard yourself stop talking and felt the echo of her voice, as if she had spoken in you, as if you weren’t quite you, but were growing and continuing in her wake, and as if her expressions were growing and emanating from your face. (Here upon you ponder, and wonder if that’s what happens to older people when they die contented – – – that they feel they have somehow transcended the wall of flesh which is crumbling fatally and forever around them and that their fire and protoplasm and pulse have leapt over bounds and will live on in off spring, continuing the chain of life …) Then there is your brother – 6 feet four inches tall, lovable and intelligent. You fought with him when you were little, threw tin soldiers at his head, gouged his neck with a careless flick of your iceskate … and then last summer, as you worked on the farm, you grew to love him, confide in him, and know him as a person … and you remember the white look of fear about his mouth that day they had all planned to throw you in the wash tub – and how he rallied to your defense. Yes, you can outline the people you’ve lived with these eighteen years in a few sentences … yet could you give an account of their lives, their hopes, their dreams? You could try, perhaps, but they would be much the same as yours … for you are all an inexplicable unity – this family group with its twisted tensions, unreasoning loves and solidarity and loyalty born and bred in blood. These people are the ones most basically responsible for what you are. Then there are the teachers – Miss Norris, the principle of grammar school; Miss Raguse, the tall, hideous 7th grade English teacher who loved poetry, and read it aloud to the class, even to the little boys destined to be garage mechanics; Mr. Crockett, the man through high school who fostered your intellectual life, along with that of your circle of classmates who took the three year advanced English course; Mrs. Koffka,⁴⁵ this year at Smith, who took up the torch and made you want to know, to think, to learn, to beat your head out against the knowledge of centuries. And there are the girls, who have come singly in a strange continuity to grow more and more intensely, to meet your growth, from the summers of camping and fern-hut building with Betsy Powley, to the tennis and talks with Mary Ventura and the pretty black-haired wit of Ruth Geisel, to the sweet sentiment of Patsy O’Neil, to the synthesis of these in Marcia. And the boys, from Jimmy Beal, who drew you pictures of pretty girls in fifth grade, and roller-skated along the beach and planned to get married in a little white house with roses on a picket fence – (you remember, absurdly now, how his little sister was drowned on the beaches while walking on ice cakes, and how you didn’t know just how to react to his white, drawn face when you saw him back at school. You wanted to say nice things and how sorry you were, and then you felt a sudden hardening and strange anger at him for his weakness which intensified yours. So you stuck out your tongue at him and made a face. And you never played with him again.) There was tall gawky John Stenberg who printed “Sylvia loves John” on his printing press and scattered little slips of paper all over the streets and in every desk at school. Mortified, yet secretly excited by such attention, you scorned his gifts of a rabbit’s foot and a date to the carnival. (Later years would have found you infinitely grateful for any of his attentions whatever.) A blank of several awkward and ungainly and ugly adolescent years ended suddenly with a brief mental infatuation, and then a slow awakening of physical relationships with boys, from the first time, at the traditional age of sixteen, that you found that a kiss was not as distasteful as once imagined. And so you could list the thirty or forty boys you’ve gone out with in the last two years of your dating existence – and append a brief, if not astringent, note of gratitude to each one for an increased education in conversation, confidence and – – – so on. Till now you comb your hair with practiced casualness and go downstairs to greet the man of the hour with a careless sparkle in your eyes born of years of “faux pas” and blunders. Gone are the days where a date began in the afternoon, with an agony of nervousness prickling the back of the neck, making hands slippery and cold with sweat – sickening nausea that wouldn’t let you eat supper – or do anything besides wait tensely, ready for at least half an hour before the boys came, and able only to check and re-check for slip-showing or hair-uncurled. And you look now at your reflection on the window and smile – for all your fat nose, you’re quite a presentable long and lithe piece of tan flesh. And your mirth congeals on your full mouth as you think of yourself growing used to your reflection after year on year of mirror-glimpses. If you had a wen on either cheek, you’d get used to that, too. And the rain is still coming down, and it is getting later and later … and you aren’t the sort of human being that can write till four in the morning and stay whole, so you trail off …

And there was yesterday, the six of us on the Cape,⁴⁶ in the beach wagon. A bright and laughing tension glittering dangerously between you and the one in the front seat who was your partner. (Have you a capacity for love of someone beside yourself? I wonder, sometimes.) You walked and you drove in the rain. You talked, taunted and teased, eating in the parked station wagon on a rise in the lonely wet black road that undulated along by the sea. Outside, beyond the cold thin glass of the rain blurred window you could see the ocean, remote and pale blue-gray, far out on the sand flats. The land was a warmer gray, with under washes of tawny yellow; soiled, and gloomy green underbrush cowered low along the dunes, and a cold tattoo of metallic raindrops beat on the canvas beach wagon roof. Inside the windows steamed from breath and heat of six bodies, rain trickled from slickers down into dark wet puddles on the rubber floor matting, and there was the wet smell of tunafish and peeled oranges. Afterwards there was more driving through the rain, and the nebulous tunnels of green smudged a unique frosted green against the windows, seen through the film of steam collecting there. A dry stop at the “Sail Loft” – a barn of a place with fishnet curtains at the windows, full of expensive wool and cotton clothes and a sparkling blue-black haired girl name Pam. People – all young – came in, and there was talk, with boys especially. You wondered briefly if the Great God could stoop to jealously – and then you felt the lovely placating touch of hands on hair in a long light caress that could have been termed possessive. You felt very gay, very foolish, very cold and wet in the big chilly room with all the boys and girls. There was a visit at a new house – a meeting of a pert, wraith-slim red haired girl called Debby and a blonde baby boy who didn’t talk, but who dimpled at his sister’s laughter. A kitchen window – big and glassed in, overlooked a hill of scrub pine, and the sea, even more grayly blue and distant than ever. You stared out, and then watched the lovely broad-shouldered blonde boy across the room stare broodingly at nothing, and idly flexing his mouth in little grimaces – you felt a feeling of belonging to him curl cosily inside you and go to sleep like a kitten in front of a fire place. To leave him in the rain for a long while – that was next, next and unreal. Lightly he said he wanted to show you his room and told the rest you’d be right back. (Girls can be so careless with affection … you recalled a year ago, a barn, and steps leading upward, as these did.) Almost surprised you let yourself be enfolded in strong arms, in a last futile attempt to conserve and gather the lovely warmth and life pulse spilling from the fibers of the other. You saw blue eyes, light blue and keen, suddenly intent and was it, was it misting? Downstairs then, and good-bye, good-bye my love, good-bye. You felt no reality, no knife of sorrow cut your intestines to bits. Only a weariness, a longing for a shoulder to sleep on, a pair of arms to curl up in – and a lack of that now. Must you wait again, till some boy down the beach likes you, asks you out, kisses you – – – and you see the evening shrink to an artificial two-dimensional slice of time – – – - must you wait till then before you feel the full impact of your loneliness?

July – 1951 – And so you sit on the porch outside your room, looking past the white patterned fence, like a stiff wooden ruffle, which stands up around the gray floorboards. You look across the long green lawn which slopes to the street, where the cars flow by, red lights winking on in the twilight. You can see the ocean, gray, rustling with waves, and blending into the fainter gray of sky. You took a tall glass of milk upstairs with you, and two small ripe peaches. Strangely lovely, it was, to sit out on the porch, with the small cool rivers of night air lapping arms and legs; strangely pleasant to bite into the sweet rounded peach, letting the tongue-drenching juice fill your mouth. You walked over to the dishpan where they left the little turtle a few days ago. He was getting soft, they said, and the sun might do him good. But the turtle basked in sun for several days, forgotten, and the water dried up, and there was no food, no moist wet place for him to hide from the bright summer sun. So you found him, on his back, withered legs and head drawn into his shell, eyes sunken into his minute green head, and you let his frail shell body fall back on the dry stones. An Airplane sounds, far off in the gray sky, and the american flag languidly rides the eddies of wind above the Preston Hotel. Three weeks you have been here, and now that you suddenly have decided to leave, it seems quite a poor thing to do. The injustice and rebellion built up inside you, against the children’s tantrums, against the daily chores, against the living always in the shadow of the lives of others – all the tired feelings and emotional disturbances burst forth today. And Marcia, in tears, and you, somber, agreed to leave. Definitely; positively, with no compromises. Your souls were going to be your own. Change of person. So Marcia called her father and told him she was coming home. I planned to call mother tomorrow. Outside, we stood together.

“Look at that ocean,” she said. “Lovely, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“First time I’ve felt so good; first time I noticed the trees and the blue.”

“Yeah. I feel terrific now,” I said.

“We’ll be nice – – oh, I’ll even give the last few days free.”

“Sure. Sure thing.”

I went in. My feet hurt. I got Joey’s blue bowl, poured Sugar Crisp in it, and filled her tin cup with milk. I heard her, then, walking up the cellar stars, bumping up, and todding into the kitchen to her high chair. I lifted her up, put on her bib, and she drank some milk.

“I-wanna-piece” … she pointed to a bag of peanuts.

You gave her one. She ate it gravely, and then stood up. One foot lifted. “Daddy,” she said hope-fully, reaching out for you to lift her down. “No,” you said, sitting her down. “Daddy” became a cry, then a wail. You lifted up the flailing bundle, thinking, oh brother, this is just about the last time. No more will I cart screaming children around, no more. I put her on the bed, crooning determinedly over the screaming. “Poor baby, you haven’t had a nap today, no wonder you’re tired. Does your arm hurt? Where’s Joey’s hand? Where’s Joey’s hand? There it is!” The last, repeated in a questioning, then a triumphant tone, usually intrigued her. Tonight she quieted momentarily, then began again. So you put her in the crib, sponge her hot dirty, chubby little face. She cries fretfully and tiredly. You start to sing in your tuneless monotone, “Bye-bye baby, remember you’re my baby … ” Eyes open wide. Thumb goes to mouth. A few convulsive sniffles. Translucent eyelids droop and lift, droop and slowly lift, and droop. You pull down the blinds. You shut the door after you, proud that you sang her to sleep, fond of her baby face and cuddly, firm little body.

That starts you feeling a little sorry. You won’t ever see her again. She won’t even remember you.

Pinny has been put to bed, Mrs. Mayo tells you in the kitchen. Two down, one to go. Freddy is in his pajamas, as the Mayos⁴⁷ leave for a cocktail party. You sit making faces at Freddy, and he laughs and laughs. As you dry the last dish, he says,

“I like being little and staying up.”

“Why?” you ask.

“Because then big people have to wait on me. I like them to wait on me. I like to get up late in the morning, too.”

“Why?” You are really fascinated.

“So they have to keep my food hot.”

“What’ll happen when you grow up?”

“Oh, then that will be bad. I’ll have to wait on someone. No I won’t either; Daddy doesn’t.”

There is something perversely and obstinately endearing about the back of Freddie’s Head. You play songs on the piano for him, and he is strangely docile. Every few minutes he gives you a sip of iced tea, as if you were a girl dying of thirst. Sweetly he goes to bed. You sit out on the porch, to get a last look at the ocean. Really, if you can even have just a few minutes before bed, it isn’t so bad. Then you wish Marcia hadn’t called her father. They have all been so nice … you can’t go through with it and leave. Somehow, you could never face yourself, quite. You would always feel that you might have done better, you might have at least finished it. So you are surprised to see that you really don’t want to go home. You see how shut-in you would feel, in your little room. How closely the trees and houses and familiar paths would crowd upon you, stifling you, smothering you, enclosing you. Here, the house is big and spacious and luxuriously comfortable. The sink is big and clean. The stove is gradually becoming more of a friend. You are a prisoner of sorts, and yet you have made yourself so. You accepted this job for what you could make out of it. You didn’t realize that for 14 hours a day you would be mentally and emotionally bound to children. But is it not worthwhile to accept it for the seven weeks more which remain – and to leave with a sense of accomplishment, if nothing else?

From here to happiness is a road, flat, upright, distances in between blotted out by vision, yet realized by intelligence. From here to there is a road leading down blue pajamas to feet, to bed post, to screen door, to gray slatted porch roof, rain-puddled and drenched, to decorative white railing, to a road, to a line of sand, to a gray, rain beaten sea. Not yet to leave, not yet. For this road is a way to savor, a way back to living again as living is full. Not of bridge-playing, not of eating a frappe with two other girls, not even of talking with another. Aloneness and selfness are too important to betray for company.

The most vital spot in the world for me was today in the rain, in an old gravel parking lot in Marblehead,⁴⁸ where, beyond a rusty shack, was the harbor, and the neat upright forest of masts. Houses were close together, and yellow flowers were growing in the wild grass. Somehow, sitting there in the light blue Plymouth, your Grandmother beside you, your mother in back, you cried with love for them because they were your own people, your own kind. Yet not all your own kind, but you were of their blood and bone, and no barriers were between. You talked, and cried a little, as you sat, for the beauty of the wild, lanky yellow flowers, and the rain, trickling down the blurred and wavy windows, rushing in streams down the windows. This hour was yours, to steer through the narrow crooked streets, to sit and talk and watch the rain, to absorb the love of kin, of rain, of the masts of sloops and schooners. And when you swung the car into reverse, roaring out, back to your job, you felt whole and human once again. Someday you will find your way back to that parking spot by the gravel drive, and you will remember how it was, so forever you can carry it in you as it was, giving life and a new sight in the rainy space of an hour.

Tonight each child went to bed after a bath. First Joey, who fussed and cried as you took the pants off her plump little body, and ran the water in the tub. Laughing, then, as you threw the soap into the water with a splash, she wriggled about in the water until you had rubbed her with soap and she was as sweet smelling and slippery as any wet, freshly bathed baby. Her long white nightgown went on then, and clean diapers. Docilely she let you put her in the crib, where you bent over her for a while, letting her pinch your nose and cheeks, smile and gurgle as she made her suprised face, and watched for you to imitate her. Then you pulled down the blinds, saying “Good-night” as the room darkened. How to say how lovely her plump two year old body is, and her baby face, smooth skinned, fair, pink cheeked, green-eyed, with a fringe of silky yellow hair? How to say that her life is to be filled with love, admiration, Paris dresses, the cream of food and drink … all her life? But this is to be so, for now it is, and this baby is secure in love and in comfort.

Pinny was next, and you gave her a “front seat” up the stairs. In her pale blue party dress, white shoes and blonde hair, she was just a hard-living little girl, a bit unsure of herself because of the love lavished on the baby and because of the domineering mastery of talkative Freddie. Her big brown eyes, pointed face and husky voice softened under the special love and attention you gave her. You learned that by making her feel important, much could be gained. A cookie, a love pat and back rub (“Oh, that feels so good!) and a song, set her off to sleep, hugging her soft, worn, special pillow. You remember how she said the first night you came, “I like a pillowcase to hug. A soft little one.”

Freddie was last, and by far the most interesting and amusing. A talkative Kewpie-doll faced boy of seven, with a Beau Brummel taste for socks and jerseys that match, and for shirts and bow ties – he appreciates more advanced stories, and is extremely clever. Tonight, after a tale about a crooked mouse, he responded to my ritual “Going to give me a goodnight hug?” with a kiss on one eyelid. “Now I have to kiss the other eye,” he said. “Then mouth.” His little mouth smacked softly. “I have to give your neck four, because it’s so large.” And so to bed.

Something maternal awakened, perhaps, by the physical contact with such lovely young babies? Something sensual aroused by young hands at breast, young cheeks against face, young warm child bodies under hands? Perhaps. And tonight was a good night, thus I feel correspondingly tender. There will be other bad nights, but remembering the versatile quicksilver shifting of children’s moods, I smile with equanimity and do not cherish grudges, as most of us adults do, letting them fester like a cancer. But I let my emotions run on the same forgiving and transient track.

“Wonder who’s going to get drunk first?” Doctor Mayo made a face, and I giggled, spreading the stiff orange cheese in little pats on the Ritz crackers. Mrs. Mayo was pouring sliced peaches and juice over a great plate of little white cakes. Macaroni and cheese sauce reposed in two great glazed brown crocks, while a huge wooden bowl waited to receive the salad. Cocktail glasses and a tray of icecubes and bottles rested on the sideboard. Twenty people for dinner, and I didn’t know whether I was in the way or not.

“How are you at whipping cream?” Mrs. Mayo asked.

“Guess I could manage.”

“I always whip it in the sink; it’s steadier.”

I tried to make the beater whir very quickly. A little muscle twitched in my arm, the cream whirled liquidly, thickening in white foam. What if it turned to butter? The time was getting close. Soon the People would come, and then it would be the usual thing: putting the children to bed, answering the last plaintive cries for a drink of water. And then would come the giddy sense of freedom. It would be past eight o’clock, and still light enough to read outside on the gray slatted porch. So you could sit there for a while until Marcia came to help you with the dishes – dishes of twenty people, twenty lovely crisp gay people.

From Freddie’s window I peered with a delicious shiver as I pulled down the blind. By leaving just a crack between the blind and the windowsill, I could satisfy my curiosity. Down below, on the stone terrace with the white railing; down below, with the white and green painted chairs sat a group of men and women, some familiar, some not. One woman leaned against the railing, hands crossed in front of her, dressed in dark blue, with a red rose at the point of a low V-neckline. Mrs. Mayo sat and talked with a group of women, while Doctor Mayo merged into the tan, gray, beige line of men. What were they talking about? What was the subtle line that marked you from entering a group such as this?

“Get into bed, now, Freddie,” I said to the small boy at the window.

“I just want to see Nancy. She just walked in. Just can I take one little peep?”

“Just one quick peep.”

“She’s so pretty in a purple dress. I bet she weighs more than you. I bet she weighs two hundred hundred pounds.”

A glance at Nancy, Jack’s girl. Oblivious of my calculating stare, she walked across the stage, smiled friendily at someone I couldn’t quite see, and stood down below, in that strange, half-curious, half-comical world on the terrace.

Out on the porch, now, I can hear the voices coming up to me, laughter, raveled words. Up here, on the second floor porch, the air blurs the syllables and continuity of conversation like sky-writing, blown from a clear lucid penciled white line to a puffy amorphic mass of cloud.

Green of grass, gray of ocean, and a deepening shade of sky, faintly pink. Always a roaring of sound in my ears – wind heaving in the trees, waves rustling on the shore, cars whirring along the turnpike. The moon, now, over the green-black tufted tops of the pines, is getting more luminous with the dying day. From the anemic, faintly cloudy globe of daytime, it is becoming chalkily, shiningly white. Third quarter lunar phase. In your mind’s eye you try to draw in the shaded part of the sphere. But it is invisible to you, amputated optically and neatly by thousands of miles of blue sky … atmosphere thickening like blue water.

Down below a thick burry voice rasps, “The moon’s out.” The reply ravels and threads on the tree leaves, and is lost to you.

There is a sound that will always be strange and unique in your remembering. It is the sound made by you and Marcia, walking on the stony beach in Marblehead. Along the North shore coast there must be many such beaches, short, hewn out of the rock, sandless, clean. Great shelves of rounded stones slope down steeply, like steppes, into the sea. Worn smooth by the waves, and baked hot by the sun, the rocks and stones shifted and clattered under our feet, sounding like the rattle and clank of chains. It was to that sound of rocks, rolling and colliding under us, that we hiked along the beach in the hot July sunlight. Both of us were deeply tan and our hair was bleached from the sun. Our skin was stiff and caked with salt, dried and crusty from swimming in the icy lucid blue water. I licked my arm for the salt taste. Up the face of a rock cliff we climbed, finding footholds as we went along. The rock was yellow-orange, hot and jagged.

“God, look at the blue,” I said.

“Wait till you get to the top,” Marty said.

She was right. Atop the great rock formation you stood, and the whole ocean curled up bluely at your feet. Slowly, with a great, patient, unanimous motion, the huge bulk of tide water heaved up and back, up and back along the coast. Sails flicked in and out of the light far out in the bay. The horizon blurred into the sky. Far, far down, at your feet, the water was the strangely clear turquoise and clouded yellow-green where submerged strata of rock were close to the surface of the sea. Small, small, you were, two brown animals crawling, minute, microscopic, up the side of a great cliff, in the huge sunlight, by a blue gigantic sea.

“I want my children to be conceived by the sea,” Marty said. And suddenly she was right. Naked bodies, two, on the rocks, under the big sky, the big stars, the big night wasteland. So much more frightening, so much more clean than if they lay, side by side, on a hot, narrow bed, in the small thick dark box of a man-made bedroom.

Lying on my stomach on the flat warm rock, I let my arm hang over the side, and my hand caressed the rounded contours of the sun-hot stone, and felt the smooth undulations of it. Such a heat the rock had, such a rugged and comfortable warmth, that I felt it could be a human body. Burning through the material of my bathing suit, the great heat radiated through my body, and my breasts ached against the hard flat stone. A wind, salty and moist, blew damply in my hair; through a great glinting mass of it I could see the blue twinkle of the ocean. The sun seeped into every pore, satiating every querulous fiber of me into a great glowing golden peace. Stretching out on the rock, body taut, then relaxed, on the altar, I felt that I was being raped deliciously by the sun, filled full of heat from the impersonal and colossal god of nature. Warm and perverse was the body of my love under me, and the feeling of his carved flesh was like no other – not soft, not malleable, not wet with sweat, but dry, hard, smooth, clean and pure. High, bonewhite, I had been washed by the sea, cleansed, baptised, purified, and dried clean and crisp by the sun. Like seaweed, brittle, sharp, strong-smelling – like stone, rounded, curved, oval, clean – like wind, pungent, salty – like all these was the body of my love. An orgiastic sacrifice on the altar of rock and sun, and I arose shining from the centuries of love, clean and satiated from the consuming fire of his casual and timeless desire.

I am tired, and the evening world beats dead, flat, numb. To sleep, no, never to wake and turn in thoughtless rest to sleep again. To wait, rather, while the dawn comes early, and wetly shining. To rise to the day, and to the crises and the indecisive lulls. And to wait, taut, smiling, till evening, and the time after eight o’clock, again, to the time you go to bed, which is yours, which is brief and private. To take, from the closet occasionally, your yellow dress, not yet worn, and hold it up against your dark tan, and smile, and say, “Oh, Dick, how wonderful to see you. Stop; don’t move. Just let me look at you.” Two days more of living, and then Dick.

Variations on a theme:

Letter form: A strange time, indeed, to compose letters is five thirty in the morning. However, with the well-timed punctuality of an alarm clock I awoke in a gray dawn today, listening instinctively for the cry of the baby which never came, only the crescendo of sleepy musical chirpings of birds in neighboring trees.

Quiet, cool and green is the early morning world, after a violent rain last night, bright flickers of lightning and sharp cracks of thunder. It is with an odd and victorious sense of going home that I shall return to Swampscott to lose myself again in the fresh, wholesome and thoroughly theraputic company of children.

And so it is that with my leaning toward allegories, similes and metaphors, I suddenly find a vehicle to express a few of the many disturbing thoughts which have been with me since yesterday. I mentioned that I would try to describe the feeling I had toward an anonomous part of the Massachusetts coastline. Simple as this task may seem, I wanted to wait until I could do it even partial justice because it forms the core of my continually evolving philosophy of thought and action.

On a relatively unfrequented, stony beach there is a great rock which juts out over the sea. After a climb, an ascent from one jagged foothold to another, a natural shelf is reached where one person can stretch at length, and stare down into the tide rising and falling below, or beyond to the bay, where sails catch light, then shadow, then light, as they tack far out near the horizon. The sun has burned these rocks, and the great continuous ebb and flow of the tide has crumbled the boulders, battered them, worn them down to the smooth sun-scalded stones on the beach which rattle and shift underfoot as one walks over them. A serene sense of the slow inevitability of the gradual changes in the earth’s crust comes over me; a consuming love, not of a god, but of the clean unbroken sense that the rocks, which are nameless, the waves which are nameless, the ragged grass, which is nameless, are all defined momentarily through the consciousness of the being who observes them. With the sun burning into rock and flesh, and the wind ruffling grass and hair, there is an awareness that the blind immense unconscious impersonal and neutral forces will endure, and that the fragile, miraculously knit organism which interprets them, endows them with meaning, will move about for a little, then falter, fail, and decompose at last into the anonomous soil, voiceless, faceless, without identity.

From this experience I emerged whole and clean, bitten to the bone by sun, washed pure by the icy sharpness of salt water, dried and bleached to the smooth tranquillity that comes from dwelling among primal things.

From this experience also, a faith arises to carry back to a human world of small lusts and deceitful pettiness. A faith, naïve and child like perhaps, born as it is from the infinite simplicity of nature. It is a feeling that no matter what the ideas or conduct of others, there is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness, in wind and sunlight, with a fellow human being who believes in the same basic principles.

Yet, when such implicit belief is placed in another person, it is indeed shattering to realize that a part of what to you was such a rich, intricate, whole conception of life has been tossed off carelessly, lightly – it is then that a stunned, inarticulate numbness paralyzes words, only to give way later to a deep hurt. It is hard for me to say on paper what I believe would best be reserved for a lucid vocal discussion. But somehow I did want you to know a little of what your surprising and perhaps injudiciously confidential information did to me yesterday. A feeling that there was no right to condemn, but that still somehow there was a crumbling of faith and trust. A feeling that there was a way to rationalize, to condone, if only by relegating a fellow human from the unique to the usual.

So there it is. The rock and the sun are waiting on the next day off – and solace.

It seems to me more than ever that I am a victim of introspection. If I have not the power to put myself in the place of other people, but must be continually burrowing inward, I shall never be the magnanimous creative person I wish to be. Yet I am hypnotized by the workings of the individual, alone, and am continually using myself as a specimen. I am possessive about time alone, more so now that my working hours are not spent studying for myself, but dancing attendance to a family. Here I am in the midst of a rich, versatile family, as close as I could get. I have made my wish come true – almost – and, as It were, picked up the roof of this lovely, spacious white house and walked in. True, in actuality I am relegated by my position to a circumscribed area of confidence, but even so, here I am. Yet so constantly am I moving, working, acting, that I do not often think “How strange this is … I am competently frying eggs for three children on Sunday morning while the parents sleep. I must learn more about these people – try to understand them, put myself in their place.” No, instead I am so busy keeping my head above water that I scarcely know who I am, much less who anyone else is. But I must discipline myself. I must be imaginative and create plots, knit motives, probe dialogue – rather than merely trying to record descriptions and sensations. The latter is pointless, without purpose, unless it is later to be synthesized into a story. The latter is also a rather pronounced symptom of an oversensitive and unproductive ego.

Now I am not sure about that letter I sent. Not sure at all. For was I not the one who acquiesced, mutely responsive and receptive? Was I not guilty of letting a boy be drawn to self-hatred? And yet does it not all come again to the fact that it is a man’s world? For if a man chooses to be promiscuous, he may still aesthetically turn up his nose at promiscuity. He may still demand a woman be faithful to him, to save him from his own lust. But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of soul, body and pride of man? Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable feminity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars – to be a part of a scene, anonomous, listening, recording – all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night …

July 19 – This morning I awoke into dampness, the windows white and vague with fog. This afternoon, while all the family was out the first big storm came. I had just washed my hair, and the rain began, big, wet drops from the great spread of sky. The house was darkened, and the lights burned weakly, it seemed, in face of the great noise of falling water outside. As excited as a child, I called to Marcia, who was playing the piano, and ran down the long carpeted hall to the front door, where I could look through the screen to the wildly heaving trees, the gray ocean, angry with white foam, the crackling blasts of sheet lightning and the immediate whip cracks and rattling, banging, earsplitting bursts of thunder. Water ran in rivers down the pavement, and suddenly I remembered to shut the windows. But even as I ran from room to room, trying to close the fourteen or fifteen windows on the side where the rain was coming in, it was too late, and the sills were wet with puddles, and the water was collecting in streams along the floor.

Tonight, after playing ping pong down in the Blodgett’s⁴⁹ basement playroom I walked back into the house with a perceptible sense of proprietorship. If nothing else, in one month I have come to regard this place with an air of home. Upstairs, especially, I am complete sovereign. I still remember the day I drove up with Dick and stood in awestruck fear outside the gate, gazing at the great lawn, the long white house, the clump of huge copper beech trees spaced carefully on the grass. Never, I thought, could I walk with carefree equanimity on that carefully clipped lawn. But I do now. Yes, and tonight I felt the wetness heavy about me; leaves, pregnant with water, soaked the sleeve of my jersey as I brushed past the bush by the kitchen steps. Up the carpeted stairs to my room, lighted only by the moon, which shone across the porch and the wet window sill with a liquid luminosity. An inexplicable quiver of intense, almost contraband, excitement filled me as I pushed open the screen door, swollen shut by the rain, and walked out onto the porch. I sat down on the cold, slick tile roof and stared at the moon shadow of the porch railing, slanting across the floor. Somehow, I think, I have a delicious feeling of presumptuousness which comes perhaps from a secret enjoyment of living with rich people and listening to and observing them. It is like hearing a supposedly confidential conversation. You wonder only how you can ever bear to live anywhere else, away from the sea, the physical ease, the sun, the spaciousness. Seated on the porch, straight ahead was the ocean, above was the big sky, with a hazy, faintly orange-tinged moon. The moon and stars seemed very small for such a big sky. Down below stretched the lawn, the street, the beach, in a line of open view. How hard it will be to return home, where the little green pine trees grow in such a close square around the house, where you can’t move freely in a room without bumping into the furniture, where mother serves cranberry juice in cream cheese glasses on an old white celluloid tray. Here the lawns swoop to the open sea, the rooms are lofty, with great picture windows, and sparkling green and golden cocktails are served on cracked ice and silver trays. How to return to the smallness, the imperfection, which is home?

Under the greenshaded lights, Elaine, still in her white maid’s uniform, was playing pool. Her face was red and shiny as she leaned over the table, trying for a long shot.

Marcia slouched over the piano, her tan a golden brown against her blue sweater, banging out a jazzy version of “Ja-Da.”

Wicker chairs were scattered in profusion about the pine paneled game room. The spasmodic click-click.… click-click of the ping pong ball sounded as Cynthia and Joan banged out an irregular ralley, stopping to chase the round white ball under the intricate path of chair and table legs after wild shots.

“Sorry,” Cynthia said, serving a high one too hard, so that it missed the proper green square.

“Heck,” Joan chased it up to the fireplace, reached behind an andiron and extricated it.

The click-click … click-click started up again.

Elaine poised for another shot, slid the stick through her fingers and drove a yellow ball into the pocket. She put down the stick and went to sit on the bench beside Marcia, who had stopped to have a cigarette.

“Donald’s out tonight,” she said. “Some girl called, and I left a message on his pillow.”

“Did you turn down the bed corners?” Marcia grinned.

“Yup. Almost decided to put in hot coals to warm the sheets.” Elaine grinned back.

“You’ve got it rough. I’d be mad as anything if they made me wear a uniform.”

“You’ve got it easy. You can just take care of the kids. That way you’re part of the family. I’m lower; I’m only the maid.”

“Hell, don’t talk that way. You’re just as good as they are. Besides, it’s just for the summer.”

“I know. But still.”

“Sure. Don’t you suppose I feel it? In the morning when I sit in the kitchen with the kids, drinking canned orange juice from a jelly glass, while Donald gets his tray on the porch, fresh squeezed juice in a goblet! Let me tell you, I wonder why he’s the one to get waited on, instead of me.”

Cynthia and Joan had stopped playing, and moved over to sit on the floor by the piano.

“This is a terrific set up you two have got here,” Joan said to Marcia and Elaine. “Don’t they ever use this game room? If I lived here, I’d use it every minute.”

“Yeah, it’s neat,” said Cynthia. “All I do is file letters and write down numbers on big sheets all day.”

“What’s it like to work in a big insurance company?” Marcia asked, grinding out her cigarette in a grimy little snow of ashes.

“Oh, it’s O.K. Every week there’s some anniversary or somebody’s leaving, so they have a shower, and you go up and see orchids all over the place. My section is mostly married women though.”

“Tell us about it. Do you get to know them much?” Elaine wanted to know.

“Well, there’s people like Harriet, the old maid. One of the women came back to work pregnant, after Harriet had kept telling her she’d never make a good mother. ‘Well, don’t you think I’ll be a good mother now?’ the woman asked Harriet. ‘No, I don’t’ Harriet sniffed. ‘You shouldn’t of done it.’ ”

I was out in the kitchen doing the dishes, scraping the soggy puddles of cereal and milk off the sticky plates, when Dr. Mayo walked in in his white jacket, hair slicked back from his thin face. He stood for a while, making cocktails. At last he said:

“Oh, to be young again …”

“What brought that on?” I asked, peering into the cupboard for some Bab-o.

“Oh, so I could enjoy these things more.”

“You don’t do too badly …”

I was suddenly struck by the comedy of the situation. Here was a young, tan eighteen year old girl perpetually doing dishes, while a husband and wife in the thirties went to one dinner and one dance and one cocktail party after another. Somehow, it seemed, the situation could well be reversed.

Mrs. Mayo rustled into the kitchen, tall, slender and darkly beautiful in a flowing nylon gown of aqua – three tones of light, medium and dark which blended and flowed into one another. She stood and made cheese crackers to go with the cocktails.

“Seems I always end up cooking in a formal,” she said.

The blonde girl stood in front of the mirror in the ladies Room of the eastern Yacht club. Her head thrown back, fringed by a copper scallop of short curls, her hips slanted boldly forward, she tossed her black and white stole from one shoulder to another, striking a seductive pose each time she did so.

“Ah could weah it lak this,” she drawled, twisting the scarf of material about her narrow waist. “Or lak this,” she wrapped it about her neck, the long fringed black ends trailing cape-like down her back. The girl seemed oblivious to all except her own reflection in the mirror before her. Would she never stop twisting the material about her body?

The fat woman who was her mother sat in a wicker chair, smiling, her carefully drawn red lips curved in a calculating grin. Her arms and hands moved slowly, plumply, like twining cobras. Little dangerous insinuating sparks lighted in her eyes, compelling, fascinating. One fleshily soft thigh crossed over the other under the rough textured linen of her dress.

Out on the porch, the young boy was very drunk. He grinned at his date, and turned to the plump, arch woman, letting his hand caress her thigh. On the porch railing the blonde girl kicked her leg high, drawling “Oh, chi-chi veree chi-chi.” Gurgling, laughing, she kissed her husband on the nose.

The blonde girl’s sister sat lustreless, her long silver hair drooping to her shoulders. “I am a peeg,” she said over and over again, showing her waist and full, slenderly pointed breasts under the Indian print dress she wore.

“Come here,” the young, drunk boy said to her. “Sit next to me. I can’t hear you talk.”

The Manhattan slithered from his hand and fell to the floor with a soprano tinkle. Clumsily he wiped the widening stain which darkened the dress of his date. The table, covered with a transparent cloth of plastic, held the pool of spilt liquor. The boy tried to drink from the glass, but the cup of the goblet was split, and he cut his lip.

Gray fog shredded thin along the flatwashed duncolored beach. Small dullgreen waves folded over upon themselves in a slither of dirty white foam, spreading out in sheets of water, reflecting the soiled morning sky. The blue tendrils of mist drifting up from the shore bleached out color in a pale soapy haze. Over the continuous in rushing sound of the tide came the shrill screams of the children, puckering the moist air that blew in smokily from the sea.

Blinding and whitehot behind the little curdled clouds, the sun began to burn through the grayblue layers of fog. Light glittered fresh and creamy on the white frame walls of the Beach Club, where blue and orange striped umbrellas made round smudges of shade beside the pool. Tinfoil bright streaks of light flickered and trembled through clear, chlorine blue water.

In green and blue deck chairs the women sat, heads back, eyes shut into the lemon-prickling glare of sun, grease shining fatly on skin, sun raw and red. Bathing suits bulged over breasts and thighs. Legs and arms extended like soft sausage, broiling with a smell of olive oil in the hot July morning.

Her smooth tan feet slapped wetly over the concrete by the pool. Steam rose from overflow puddles of sunwarmed water seeping down into the porous pavement. Squinting against the glittering light which trembled, liquid and iridescent, on the shivering, shattered glass of the water, and slid whitely along the slippery flashing limbs of the swimmers, she walked down the granite steps onto the beach, where the sand was cool and soft under her stone scalded feet.

PRIVATE, only guests of members admitted: no trespassing. The wire fence around the pool and outdoor terrace was high. It enclosed the sterile turquoise blue pool, the striped umbrellas, the tennis courts, and the parking lot, where sleek shiny cars crowded, rump after chromium-plated rump.

A boy in wrinkled khaki pants and a T-shirt was spearing up dried black snarls of seaweed with a pitchfork. He moved slowly along the beach, – picking up the litter left by the last high tide …

The wet gray August morning oozed in upon her consciousness as she lay limp on the porch cot. The damp softness of the sheets was cool against her skin. In the dim half light she stretched wearily, yawned, and thought, “No, not another day beginning.” There was still time yet; time to lie languidly on the cot in the thick, rainmoist air; time to let eyelids open, shut, open, shut in a gradually quickening cadance until eyes remained open, staring at the green leaves crowding against the screen, tiredly straining to make out the sleeping huddled form of Lane on the cot by her side. Lane stirred, rubbed her eyes, and grunted plaintively into her pillow. Her hair tumbled into her eyes as she hauled herself up on one elbow and stared back at the girl on the other cot. “God,” she said, “I can’t get up. I can’t face it.” She let herself fall back on to the bed and nuzzled into the covers, trying to shut out the paling dawn.

Inside the house, Mrs. Avery came downstairs. Through the stained and dirty glass of the porch door, the girl watched the dark form move about in the deep shadows of the livingroom. Dampness permeated everything. The girl sat up in bed and swung her feet to the floor. The twine rug was clammy under the calloused soles of her bare feet. Her seersucker pajamas fell in damp folds about her body, clinging to her skin which felt slick, greasy and unclean, polluted by contact with the foul air.

Shakily the girl stood up, shook her head, and padded across the porch, opened the door to the livingroom after much pushing, as it was swollen by the moist air and stuck stubbornly to its wooden frame, and proceeded to the bathroom.

In the small steamy room, the girl sat sleepily down on the toilet, releasing the bright stream of strong smelling urine, rubbing her hands meditatively along the flesh of her bare thighs. A smell of soap and toothpaste, of warm, wet facecloths and damp towels curled around her as she sat slumped on the toilet seat, head in hands, thinking, “No, please, God, not another day beginning.”

It is 11:30 p.m. on the evening of August first, nineteen hundred and fifty one John Blodgett is seventy years old, and I am very tired. I wonder why I don’t go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip one hour more of sleep and live. If I did not have this time to be myself, to write here, to be alone, I would somehow, inexplicably, lose a part of my integrity. As it is, what I have written here so far is rather poor, rather unsatisfactory. It is the product of an unimaginative girl, preoccupied with herself, and continually splashing about in the shallow waters of her own narrow psyche. As an excuse, she claims these are writing exercises, a means of practice at expressing herself, of note taking for future stories. Yet on the merry-go-round of time there is scarcely enough to spent pondering and attempting to recapture details. In fact, if one has not the imagination to create characters, to knit plots, it does no good to jot down fragments of life and conversation, for alone they are disjointed and meaningless. It is only when these bits are woven into an artistic whole, with a frame of reference, that they become meaning-ful and worthy of more than a cursory glance. Therefore, think and work, think and work.

Pinny kicked and screamed as I carried her upstairs. With a strong sense of power I tossed her on the bed in her party dress. “Mummy, mummy!” she yelled, her small face contorted, her legs and arms flailing.

“Call Sylvia,” Grandma had said as they served cocktails in the diningroom. “Sylvia, Pinny slapped me when I asked her to go upstairs.”

So Sylvia carried a howling holocaust up to bed. Holding down the furious, scarlet-faced child, I touched by accident, the correct lever, “Do you,” I intoned between my teeth, “want me to spank you?” She gasped, gulped for breath. “No.…” “Then not one more sound.” There was, at last, silence. I undressed her, put on cotton underpants, and asked her to hug me goodnight. With the sweetness of a victim who knows she’s beaten, she kissed me goodnight. Rancor left, not festering, but placid.

Lane came up to my room, in her white uniform, looking very mischievous and pixie-ish. Her hair crisped in little impromptu curls about her face.

“They’re eating, now,” she said by way of explaining her presence. “Helen will call me I guess when she wants help with the dishes.”

“I’m going to bed early,” I said. “Sitting on Pinny doesn’t agree with my constitution.”

Just then there was a cool green silken rustle on the stairs. “Will you help,” Mrs. Mayo asked, “with the dishes.”

In the kitchen, contagious laughter trickled from the dining room to where we stood, scraping plates thick with fat and scabrous remains of baked potato. Helen stood over the sink, her heavy bulk sweating profusely, making dark wet stains on her faded print housedress.

“Have some turkey,” she offered, puffing at her cigarette. The gutted carcass of the turkey reposed on a huge silver platter which held cold white waxen puddles of fat in the scalloped flutings of the edge.

Lane took a handful of peanuts from the counter of rejected and superfluous hors d’oeuvres instead. She brushed the salt from her hands after eating them.

“Better bring in the ice cream,” Mrs. Mayo and her sister were out in the kitchen, busily lighting the red and white candles of the enormous birthday cake. On a green and blue sugar sea with coconut whitecaps sailed a brown icing sloop, proudly flaunting red and white and blue yacht club flags. The small wax candles dipped and flared as one of the boys carried the sugar objet d’art into the glittering laughter and gleaming linen festivity of the dining room where twenty dinnerguests sucked the last masticated fragments of turkey from their teeth, wiped greasy lips on dry linen napkins, and glowed under the expansive sociable flood of liquor through their blood streams.

The door swung shut, and Lane and I charlestoned crazily around the kitchen table, as Helen clucked in mock dismay, and plunged another load of dirty glasses into the steamy soapy water.

Later the guests adjourned to the livingroom for after-dinner coffee. Lane and I walked jauntily into the empty dining room and sat at either end of the great white table with twenty dirty dessert plates and glasses ringed about it. Ladling some melting vanilla ice cream on fresh plates we pretended we were Alice and the White Rabbit at the Mad Hatter’s tea Party.

There comes a time when all your outlets are blocked, as with wax. You sit in your room, feeling the prickling ache in your body which constricts your throat, tightens dangerously in little tear pockets behind your eyes. One word, one gesture, and all that is pent up in you – festered resentments, gangrenous jealousies, superfluous desires – unfulfilled – all that will burst out of you in angry impotent tears – in embarrassed sobbing and blubbering to no one in particular. No arms will enfold you, no voice will say, “There, There. Sleep and forget.” No, in your new and horrible independence you feel the dangerous premonitory ache, arising from little sleep and taut strung nerves, and a feeling that the cards have been stacked high against you this once, and that they are still being heaped up. An outlet you need, and they are sealed. You live night and day in the dark cramped prison you have made for yourself. And so on this day, you feel you will burst, break, if you cannot let the great reservoir seething in you loose, surging through some leak in the dike. So you go downstairs and sit at the piano. All the children are out; the house is quiet. A sounding of sharp chords on the keyboard, and you begin to feel the relief of loosing some of the great weight on your shoulders.

Quick footsteps up cellar stairs. A sharp thin annoyed face around the bannister. “Sylvia, will you please not play the piano in the afternoon during office hours. It bangs right through downstairs.”

Paralyzed, struck numb, branded by his cold voice you lie “Sorry. I had no idea you could hear.”

So that too is gone. And you grit your teeth, despising yourself for your tremulous sensitivity, and wondering how human beings can suffer their individualities to be mercilessly crushed under a machine-like dictatorship – be it of industry, state or organization – all their lives long. And here you agonize for a mere ten weeks of your life, when you have only four more weeks to go anyway.

Liberty, self-integral freedom, await around the corner of the calendar. All of life is not lost, merely an eighteeth summer. And perhaps something good has been sprouting in the small numb darkness all this while.

And times there are when you feel very wise and ageless. You are sunning on the rocks, the water splashing at your feet, when a small chubby frecklefaced girl of about ten approaches you, her hand holding something that is invisible, but evidently quite precious.

“Do you know,” she asks earnestly, “do starfish like hot or cold water best?”

Today I made a Devil’s Food Cake for the first time. While I was making the frosting, Joanne, sitting happily on the floor, spilled a box of Ivory Snow. After mopping that sticky soapy mess up, I followed her to the living room, where she had located a carton of cigarettes, and had just emptied one pack in a sifting of loose tobacco on the Oriental rug. Picking her up under one arm, I headed back to the kitchen, where my layer cakes reposed. I couldn’t figure out how to turn them over so that the plates would hold the two cakes. I put the plates upside down on top of the layers as they sat on the rack and turned the racks over so that the plates would turn out rightside up, holding the layers. Lack of foresight was revealed when the heavy rack, turned over on top of the cakes, crushed deeply into them and crumbled large pieces from the edge. I had not made enough frosting to spread over the side of the cake to conceal the messy uneven edges, so I cut three pieces of the worst-looking part for our lunch. They crumbled into little shapeless brown masses on the plates. So I hid them in a cupboard in order that no one would see them. When it would be dessert time I would spirit them out and hope the children would devour them quickly.

God, the days go by and by, and here is the night before the second day. Downstairs, whitely powdered with confectioners’ sugar, reposing in a round blue tin, are the date-nut bars I made. On the kitchen windowsill, cooling, is the large pottery bowl full of applesauce I made from green apples I picked in the orchard this afternoon. In the newspaper, the dead lock over a Korean armistice is still going on; a widow Tabor’s letter about saving face and squeezing out more than a stalemate of the Chinese forces is getting a big play; Anglo-Iranian crisis is still rampant; senate voting a cut in foreign aid … (bad sign?) and on page 14 Mrs. MacGonigle, age 103, tells how to live to a ripe maturity: “Eat lots of fish and keep away from busses and trains.” Three children whom I have grown to love sleep in the empty house. I lie here, sprawled naked on the bed, all windows open, and the rustling salt air blowing in across my smooth brown body, and the iced evening odor of cold cut wet grass, and the shush of waves breaking at the end of the street. And god, for the spirits of ammonia to make the weary lethargic-spirited mind sneeze itself into acute and tremulous awareness – there is the flood, the great silver blue swatch, the oriental silver twinkle of moonlight on ocean water.

“Your hair smells nice, Pinny.” I said, sniffing her freshly washed blonde locks. “It smells like soap.”

“Does my eye?” she asked, wriggling her warm, nightgowned body on my arms.

“Does your eye what?”

“Smell nice?”

“But why should your eye smell nice?”

“I got soap in it,” she explained.

Over the sound of the electric garbage disposal unit, roaring hoarsely and devouring orange peels, egg shells and coffee grounds, I could hear the doctor on the phone. He was following a case which I had already heard snatches about in a similar way.

“This trouble seemed to be explained when we diagnosed a duodenal ulcer. We thought that once we put her on the proper diet, milk every hour, and so forth, that the disturbance would clear up. However, this morning she vomited several cupfuls of liquid, like coffee, which was really old blood. At her age we don’t want to take chances, and will keep looking for a tumor …”

What could this not be worked into? Not only medical details, fine as a basis, but who is She, and who is the one who keeps calling to find out about Her condition? I must make up something to fill in the great gaps in my knowledge … Yet have I the will, the experience, the imagination?

The wind has blown a warm yellow moon up over the sea; a bulbous moon, which sprouts in the soiled indigo sky, and spills bright winking petals of light on the quivering black water.

I am at my best in illogical, sensuous description. Witness the bit above. The wind could not possibly blow a moon up over the sea. Unconsciously, without words, the moon has been identified in my mind with a balloon, yellow, light, and bobbing about on the wind. The moon, according to my mood, is not slim, virginal and silver, but fat, yellow, fleshy and pregnant. Such is the distinction between April and August, my present physical state and my sometime-in-the-future physical state. Now the moon has undergone a rapid metamorphoses, made possible by the vague imprecise allusions in the first line, and become a tulip or crocus or aster bulb, whereupon comes the metaphor: the moon is “bulbous”, which is an adjective meaning fat, but suggesting “bulb”, since the visual image is a complex thing. The verb “sprouts” intensifies the first hint of a vegetable quality about the moon. A tension, capable of infinite variations with every combination of words, is created by the phrase “soiled indigo sky”. Instead of saying blatantly “in the soil of the night sky”, the adjective “soiled” has a double focus: as a description of the smudged dark blue sky and again as a phantom noun “soil”, which intensifies the metaphor of the moon being a bulb planted in the earth of the sky. Every word can be analyzed minutely – from the point of view of vowel and consonant shades, values, coolnesses, warmths, assonances and dissonances. Technically, I suppose the visual appearance and sound of words, taken alone, may be much like the mechanics of music … or the color and texture in a painting. However, uneducated as I am in this field, I can only guess and experiment. But I do want to explain why I use words, each one chosen for a reason, perhaps not as yet the very best word for my purpose, but nevertheless, selected after much deliberation. For instance, the continuous motion of the waves makes the moonlight sparkle. To get a sense of fitful motion, the participleal adjectives “winking” (to suggest bright staccato sparks) and “quivering” (to convey a more legato and tremulous movement) have been used. “Bright” and “black” are obvious contrasts of light & dark. My trouble? Not enough free thinking, fresh imagery. Too much subconscious clinging to clichés and downtrodden combinations. Not enough originality. Too much blind worship of modern poets and not enough analysis and practice.

My purpose, which I mentioned quite nebulously a while back, is to draw certain attitudes, feelings and thoughts, into a psuedo-reality for the reader. (“Pseudo” of necessity.) Since my woman’s world is perceived greatly through the emotions and the senses, I treat it that way in my writing – and am often overweighted with heavy descriptive passages and a kaleidoscope of similes.

I am closest to Amy Lowell, in actuality, I think. I love the lyric clarity and purity of Elinor Wylie, the whimsical, lyrical, typographically eccentric verse of e e cummings, and yearn toward T.S. Eliot, Archibald Macleish, Conrad Aiken.…

And when I read, God, when I read the taut, spare, lucid prose of Louis Untermeyer, and the distilled intensities of poet after poet, I feel stifled, weak, pallid; mealy mouthed and utterly absurd. Some pale, hueless flicker of sensitivity is in me. God, must I lose it in cooking scrambled eggs for a man … hearing about life at second hand, feeding my body and letting my powers of perception and subsequent articulation grow fat and lethargic with disuse?

Squinting into the bright sunlight, she stared at the flat rectangular expanse of water in the out door swimming pool. A frangible mosaic of chlorineblue light, shot through with tinfoil sunstreaks, shattered, shivered, and again blended and remolded into a new quivering brittle pattern, only to break again into tremulous watery blue chaos with the splashing plunge of a diver from the ten foot tower.

Slight revision: “And the wind has blown a warm yellow moon up over the sea: a bulbous moon which sprouts in the soiled indigo sky and spills winking white petals of light upon quivering black plains of ocean water.

Helen sat at the kitchen table eating, her great soft doughy bulk leaning over her plate as she cut the fatty meat into small chunks and shoved them into her plump pink mouth, with her calloused fingers, like greasy white sausage.

“Och, I feel oily,” she muttered through a mouthful of buttery mashed potato, “what with all them beets an butter an taters. I kin feel it; I’m getting fat. I’ll have to stop eating next week.”

Joanne was gurgling in her highchair. She had potato and butter in her hair, and her plump baby face was shining under stains of beet juice. “Budda. I wan budda …” she caroled, reaching a pink sticky hand toward the table.

“Watch this,” Helen winked confidentially at me. She took a potato skin from her plate and folded it over a lump of butter. Joanne accepted the skin, slowly unfolded it, and with the expression of a two-year old Columbus discovering America, plucked forth the yellow blob of butter and devoured it.

“More budda … more budda …”

Helen chuckled and repeated the process of the folded potato skin. Joanne responded happily.

“Do you really think it’s good for her to have all that butter?” I asked a bit anxiously, seeing a third greasy skin heading Joanne’s way.

“It’ll grease her cold, dont cha think?” Helen said. “Aspirin breaks it up, but butter’ll grease it good.”

From the kitchen window, over the sink, she could see Fred, one of the gardeners, weeding the rows of lettuce. Beyond the algebraic green exactness of the rows were the apple trees, fully in leaf, with vermilion apples winking in the windy sunlight. The margins of the lawn were clipped in mathematical care, and the litter of the dying leaves and the fallen pinecones were scrupulously raked up in piles every morning and burned with the rubbish behind the white shingled tool shed. Fred bent his creaking old back down over the ruffled pale green lettuce heads and tweaked the thin lanky weeds from the crumbled black soil. His faded blue shirt was open at the throat, showing a brown-stained neck, with the skin and muscles taut and wrinkled, like a walnut shell, or the gnarled dark surface of a peach stone. Soon he would come up to the back door with a large flat basket of baby beets, carrots and young milky tasseled corn.

“Does the missus want any vegetables,” he would ask.

And the missus would come out into the kitchen, cool and slim in dark blue shantung shorts and shirt. “Why Fred,” she would say with the gracious and accustomed familiarity she always used toward any of the family employees, “why Fred, fresh corn; how lovely.”

The girl plunged another stack of egg-encrusted plates into the soapy dishwater. A wet slop on the plate with the rag. Rinse. Put in strainer. Slop. Rinse. Strainer. Slop. Rinse. Strainer.

And the missus left a pile of corn to be husked and cooked for dinner.

August 30 – 1:45 p.m. Right about now I should start getting lyrical and extremely elated. I am just that, as a matter-of-fact, but my glorying in physical well-being is tempered by a touch of nostalgia of the “Sweet-Thames-Run-Softly-till-I-End-My-Song” variety. Only this time I will punctuate with my old “Never Again” refrain.

On the last day before the family comes home from their week’s cruise, I sit in careless freedom on my large sunporch outside the guest room. In aqua haltar and blue shorts, wet hair drying, bleaching to streaked blond in the sun, sun tan oil splashed freshly on deepening brown flesh, my poetry books beside me. Ever since they went away, leaving Helen and me with the house and Pinny and Joanne I have felt the intangible steel cord of subservience loosened from my intestines. Never again will I linger in pure gastronomic liberty over a dinner of fresh corn and lambchops, or steak with fresh iced peaches and vanilla icecream for dessert. Never again will I dry myself after an invigorating swim in the blue salt ocean visible from this house on the hill, put on a clean cotton dress over a vivid, electric, cooly tingling body, and bike jauntily to market to buy “anything I want” to eat. Never again will I sit on the porch of this mansion, become so firmly and temporarily mine these past days, hearing the hoarse waves heaving, seeing the blue green water over the lawn, between the great pensive sighing trees. I could play my piano, if I wanted, or read, or sleep, or merely sit here, feet scalded by the burning gray-slatted floor, sun frying willing flesh, writing.

Today I got a post card – adorably and laboriously printed by my favorite Freddie. Pinny and Joey sleep dociley – beautiful lovable, spoiled babies – my children. Complete physical well-being, exalted environment, a sense of capability and self-integrality never before felt. God, for the sun, beating, beating, melting my body to gleaming warm bronze, bronze-thighed, bronze-breasted, ripe and full, glowing. And oh, for the thin copper threads of my hair, incandescent in the sun drenched wind. For the screams and squeals of children and gulls over the continuous splash of the waves. Blue, flashing white, space, heat, salt, bird twitters and chirps in the grieving, sighing trees, and at night, the dark, indigo sky, often the fog, and lights hanging in suspended blurred globes. Even wet laundry flapping in the grass-flavored wind. Even a childs’ freshly-bathed body under my finger tips.

God, how I love it all. And who am I, God-whom-I-don’t-believe-in? God-who-is-my-alter-ego? Suddenly the turn table switches to a higher speed, and in the whizzing that ensues I loose track of my identity. I act and react, and suddenly I wonder “Where is the girl that I was last year? … Two years ago? … What would she think of me now?” And I remember vaguely tolstoi’s argument about fate and inevitability and free will. As an act recedes into the past and becomes imbedded in the network of one’s individuality it seems more and more a product of fate – – inevitable. However, an act in the immediate present seems to be more a product of free will.

Is it not that a particular act becomes inevitable, while obviously so, since completed. Take the Smith business. I still can’t remember just what put the idea of a double college application into my head, but apply I did. And a year ago last May, after having been accepted and even having gotten $850 scholarship from the college, I still didn’t know whether or not I could go – because of complete lack of funds. Teetering then, as I did, I could not imagine myself in coming years – because I could not picture my environment – Wellesley, the old homestead – or Smith, the new untried independent field? Smith it became, and with it my horizons popped open – New Haven, New Jersey, New York – Dick, Marcia – and Mrs. Koffka – all the rest. Seems impossible now that anything else could have happened to me – such is the poverty of my imagination. This summer – aided by the agency of the Smith vocational office and Marcia, would hardly have come into being were it not for SMITH … Yet had I gone to Wellesley, I could only hazard about what might have appeared inevitable.

After incoherent rambling, I will say that I amuse my leisure hours by cultivating that stubborn unimaginative state of mind which refuses to dream, imagine or conjecture about any situation’s reality except the present. Events, as one grows older, first stand out in relief, and then start whizzing by like a deck of cards. Spoken words, felt emotions, actual situations – all lapse almost immediately into a dry, theoretical vacuum. For instance: Dick. All that occurred last spring – – – all that I thought and felt and said – and recorded as reality, has lapsed into that wooden mechanical world which can be wound up and set going in day dreams, ticking over like somebody else’s movie film. But who is Dick? Who am I? My stubborn unimaginative self cannot conceive of him as a flesh-and-blood being any more, because in the last two-and-a-half months of my life he has only been a reality twice briefly and peculiarly. All tensions – mental and emotional, wound in those two encounters. Yet, not having had time to get used to the boy, I awoke after the real hours were gone – to find myself believing in him only in theory. Odd is the human complexity when examined and questioned. I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost … but won’t. It is sad to be able only to mouth other poets. I want someone to mouth me.

Dick is real only in that time was (which time is vaguely and dreamily recalled in dreams and in thoughtful seconds …) and in that time will be (a similiar vague and faceless conception of what will happen and where and with whom.) Time present is Non-Dick. And if I maintain that stubborn state where time present – made up only of temporary physical reality, sensual perceptions and spasmodic streams-of-consciousness – is the only reality, why then Dick is naught but an unsigned picture, a handful of letters and two carved wooden objects – a pickle fork & knife. But this state of mind is born of a renunciation of complexities. It is a negation of sorts. A return to the womb, Freud might have it. Overwhelmed by lack of time, race of time, speed of time, I retreat into non-thought – merely into Epicurean sensual observations and desires – momentary ephemeral flashes of well-being and ill-being. Do I think? After a fashion. Do I put myself in other people’s minds and viscera? No. Not half enough. Do I listen? Yes. Tonight I listened for three solid hours to Ann Hunt⁵⁰ review her life, her background, and her vocations. Do I create? No, I reproduce. I have no imagination. I am submerged in circling ego. I listen, God knows why. I say I am interested in people. Am I rationalizing? God knows. Maybe he doesn’t. If he lives in my head or under my left ventricle, maybe he’s too uncomfortable to know much of anything.

Why am I obsessed with the idea I can justify myself by getting manuscripts published? Is it an escape – an excuse for any social failure – so I can say “No, I don’t go out for many extra-curricular activities, but I spend alot of time writing.” Or is it an excuse for wanting to be alone and meditate alone, not having to brave a group of women? (Women in numbers have always disturbed me.) Do I like to write? Why? About what? Will I give up and say “living and feeding a man’s insatiable guts and begetting children occupies my whole life. Don’t have time to write?” Or will I stick to the damn stuff and practice? Read and think and practice? I am worried about thinking. Mentally I have led a vegetable existence this summer.

However. After getting up at 6 am this morning, I am hardly in a lucid state at 1 am the next morning. Adieu.

Suddenly, I stopped dead. I had opened my calendar to the month of August as usual, to write in the neat white box labeled with day and date, a scant summary of the activities completed in the last 12 hours. Sickened, I saw that I had unwittingly completed the last day of August. Tomorrow would be September. God! All the quick futility of my days cascaded upon me, and I wanted to scream out in helpless fury at the hopeless inevitable going on of seconds, days and years. By the time I fill in this page, said I, I will have finished my job, gone home, spent four days at the Cape and either added to or detracted from my relationship with the one man-in-my-life at present, passed or failed my driving test, given my speech at the Smith Club tea, packed my things, and embarked on a merry-go-round among much jingling of bells and harnesses and neighing of horses, to whiz through another year of my life – becoming nineteen (where do they hide the young, tender years?) and beating out some sort of life at Smith.… . crisping into woollen autumn and into the darkening iron of November … and Christmas … vacation – grinding through an icy, mud-grimy January-February-March, and tentatively, unbelievingly, unfolding into another spring, when the damn world makes us think we are as young as we ever were and deceives us by pale lucid skies and the sudden opening of little leaves.

All this is a quick sketch of the scared naked fear and grief that congealed in me when I saw the vivid young living of my days boxed off and numbered in faceless white squares. Good bye, Freddie, Pinny, Joey – (my sweet, my love, who glanced in fragrant tilted-black lashed tenderness at me, cooing over supper cereal. God, how straight your two-year old back under the ankle-length white flannel night gown; how firm and clean your baby flesh.)

Good-bye Helen, and good-bye to your fat comforting Irish humor: “Lord, Sylvia, you should have seen that wave. It come in over her head and she was choking for breath when she come up. The water ran out of her for ten mintutes straight, streamin from her nose and mouth. An I said ‘There goes the cold; salt water’ll wash it out good …’ ”

Good-bye, Katherine, with your thick glasses, and the one eye that looks at you sideways and the other that stares at you head on. Good-bye to your ugly, scaly arms, your gaunt crooked body in the dirty apron, your cracked, querulous voice and crabbed caviling which hides only, as I know, a deep and pathetic loneliness. Born of lack of your own kind, born of no one to talk to, no one who will wait and sympathize when you quaver plaintively: “I’m so ner-r-r-vous; so lonely; I can’t sleep, and I’m so tired.” Old, old, you are, with a cropped white head of stiff, greasy hair. Old, old you are, and Ireland and your girlhood are gone, as if they never were. Now you amble arthritically around the Blodgett kitchen, burning batches of toll-house cookies, and rattling among your bent aluminum saucepans on the ugly black stove.

Farewell, blonde, brown, adenoid-voiced Radcliffe senior Ann. For two months I lived next to you, and never spoke or knew you – really. And then, that night you came over when I was alone in the twilight in the kitchen, slicing peaches; I poured out a glass of milk for you, and scooped ice-cream on a plate, adding beside it grapes and a peach. I asked you about yourself, and you talked suddenly, on and on, until the planes of your face grew dark and the silver of your hair shone dully only, and still I could not move to turn on a light. Remember, I must, yet how can I, what you told me of your mother (Queen of the University of Oklahoma – descended from the woman who originated the palmer method of hand writing – who quit college in her first year to marry a handsome young man with insanity in his family. On the oil fields, the couple lived, and the woman taught in the day, worked in her husband’s store in the evening, giving birth, at the age of 21, to a boy John, and at the age of 28, to a girl, Ann. During the depression, the father sent the mother to the store for medicine. When she returned with her two-year old daughter, he had shot himself to death in the garage. So she worked on, determined to send her children to college. She married again. A Mr. Matthews, who had also been married before, when young and spoiled, to a similiar woman who had left him. One-eighth an Indian, Matthews saved the funds from his “head-rights” from oil in Oklahoma, went to the University, and then on a fellowship to Europe and Geneva. On his return, he married. When his marriage failed he moved to a minute town in Oklahoma, settled in a one-room stone house with a few pots and pans and a typewriter, and wrote his first novel “Wannaka” which became a Book-of-the-Month. Ann was brought up in that one-room stone house. She never knew or played with anyone her own age. She and her brother never fought. Her mother sacrificed every thing for them. John went to Prep school and Harvard. He now is married and teaching English while writing a novel.

Ann went to Mary Burnham. In the summer she went back to Oklahoma and lay out in the grass in the sun by the stone house in the prairies. Her father never worked; he was too artistic to work for a living. Her parents borrowed money until no one would lend them anymore, because it never got paid back.

Ann got the south-western Regional to Radcliffe. She lived in a private home, cooking and taking care of children for board and room. While she was still at Mary Burnham, she thought that she would be completely happy if only she fell passionately in love. A friend of her brothers, whom she had seen only once at the awkward age of thirteen, suddenly and for no reason sent her a bottle of Chanel Number 5. They exchanged letters. He sent her a Bulova wristwatch. The next summer he drove up from texas in his Lincoln conertible with a bottle of Burbon, and they spent the evening at a road-house playing a jukebox that had classical music. He asked her to marry him. That was her first proposal.

Last summer, Ann worked at Melody Manor – an ancient and peculiar hotel on Lake George. Seems it was once a private mansion, built by a rich man who murdered his fiancée’s lover. A young ambitious Polish boy, having begun a prosperous window-washing business in the United States, saved two-hundred thousand dollars and bought this great mansion, planning to turn it into a hotel.

Mr. Dombeck, however, did not have the funds needed, really to make a success of the place. There were hardly any guests. Ann worked seven days a week from seven am to pm as a secretary. She never saw the light of day. The first weeks she went to bed right after work, but then she started putting on a dress and going down to the bar after hours, playing poker with the guests, and often drinking there till after one in the morning.

The help was peculiar. There was the little old chamber maid, who always kept the light on in her room, lest she be molested. There was the dishwasher, who wore his hair long, dark, slicked back to the crown of his head, and who never changed his clothes all the time he was there. He followed Ann, always at a distance, and spoke strangely: his sole topic of conversation was that of ancient history – he talked continually of turkish leaders, of battles, of the Visigoths. Ann hazarded that he had once been confined in a prison or insane asylum where the only books he had been able to read were history books.

After an incident, absurd, involving Bernard, her boyfriend, she was asked to leave Melody Manor, on the pretense that they could no longer pay her $20 a week. By this time the place was $5000 dollars in debt. Ann knew; she kept the books.

Among the reasons for the failure of Melody Manor – – – the bar was a sunporch, with rugs and armchairs, and a place where a fountain used to play, with great glass doors overlooking the lake – – – “no one wants to drink in a front livingroom … especially at night”; then, too, the only entertainment was the electric organ. The man who played it was a small-time music teacher; he and his wife lived in the barn. The lake was there, lovely, to be sure, but with no place to swim – no beach, no boats.

And so Ann left … and so I leave Ann.

And so I leave the two streetlights at the end of Beach Bluff Avenue which shone in crosses of light through my open door every night. And the crickets chirping on the wind. And the blue of Preston Beach water, and the fat, gold-toothed, greasy-haired Jews sunning themselves, and oiling their plump, rutted flesh. Good-bye Castle Rock, where I swam with Marcia, with Lane, with Gordon, where I walked with Dick. And my quaint, crooked-streets of Marblehead, with hollyhocks springing tall from the narrow dooryards, and the cracked pavement.

I want to stay awake for the next three days and nights, drawing the threads of my summer cocoon neatly about me and snipping all the loose ends: to savor until the dying of the last wave, the last dawn, this place, the leaving of which means leaving a great space of living … and aging, aging. Heading back toward the close oppressive green of solid earth, of a corner lot in a little Suburb … of a closeness, a miscellaneous crowding of self and activities – and a brief nomadic existence before plunging onto the next great phase – – – my sophomore year.

So I perversely circle the late stars, drowsier and drowsier, sleepily longing for something – – – – – nothing – talking, working, eating, wondering always who am I? Who is this girl I hear talking?

September 1

Here follows my first sonnet, written during the hours of 9 to 1 a.m. on a Saturday night, when in pregnant delight I conceived my baby. Luxuriating in the feel and music of the words, I chose and rechose, singling out the color, the assonance and dissonance and musical effects I wished – lulling myself by supple “l” ’s and bland long “a’s” and “o’s.” God, I am happy – It’s the first thing I’ve written for a year that has tasted wholly good to my eyes, ears and intellect.

Sonnet: to Spring

you deceive us with the crinkled green

of juvenile stars, and you beguile us with

a bland vanilla moon of maple cream:

again you tame us with your april myth.

—

last year you tricked us by the childish jingle

of your tinsel rains; again you try,

and find us credulous once more. A single

diabolic shower, and we cry

—

to see the honey flavored morning tilt

clear light across the watergilded lawn.

although another of our years is spilt

on avaricious earth, you lure us on:

—

Again we are deluded and infer

That somehow we are younger than we were.

And do your ears quite suddenly and without warning burn red? Or do you, washing dishes, with the same clothes you wore two years ago rotting under your armpits, still talk about the visigoths to your oh so pathetic self and divine nothing?

I put you in a book because a girl with pale blonde hair and an adenoidal and entirely charming nasal twang to her voice told me about you one night. The girl and I had been eating grapes in the twilight at the enamel kitchen table, and the planes of her face suddenly were growing darker, and I could hardly see her, but still we didn’t move to turn on the light.

Two years ago you didn’t change your clothes, and stood in the doorway of the old hotel, watching from afar a girl named Ann, with pale wet silver hair, walking alone in the night beside Lake George.

Acrid with the stench of dried sweat were your clothes, and your long slick oily black hair, and your hands were puffed and creased, soft and unhealthily white from the hot steaming dishwater.

Tell me (for I know you), do your ears burn red?

September – 1951

I see it all now. Or at least I begin to see. I see in the boy who, because of necessity (lack of other contacts) has become the only answer to a need, the germs of all I fear and would avoid. I see the equally blinding necessity of taking what is best for the time being, lest there be no such chance in the future.

Why am I so perturbed by what others rejoice in and take for granted? Why am I so obsessed? Why do I hate what I am being drawn into so inexorably? Why, instead of going to bed in the kindly, erotic dark, and smiling languidly to myself in the night, say “Some day I will be physically and mentally satiated, if I lead myself in the right path …” – why do I sit up later, until the physical fire grows cold, and lash my brains into cold calculating thought?

I do not love; I do not love anybody except myself. That is a rather shocking thing to admit. I have none of the selfless love of my mother. I have none of the plodding, practical love of Frank and Louise, Dot and Joe.⁵¹ I am, to be blunt and concise, in love only with myself, my puny being with it’s small inadequate breasts and meagre, thin talents. I am capable of affection for those who reflect my own world. How much of my solicitude for other human beings is real and honest, how much is a feigned lacquer painted on by society, I do not know. I am afraid to face myself. Tonight I am trying to do so. I heartily wish that there were some absolute knowledge, some person whom I could trust to evaluate me and tell me the truth.

My greatest trouble, arising from my basic and egoistic self-love, is jealousy. I am jealous of men – a dangerous and subtle envy which can corrode, I imagine, any relationship. It is an envy born of the desire to be active and doing, not passive and listening. I envy the man his physical freedom to lead a double life – his career, and his sexual and family life. I can pretend to forget my envy; no matter, it is there, insidious, malignant, latent.

My enemies are those who care about me most. First: my mother. Her pitiful wish is that I “be happy.” Happy! That is indefinable as far as states of being go. Or perhaps you can run it off glibly, as Eddie did, and say it means reconciling the life you lead with the life you wish to lead – (often, I think meaning the reverse.)

At any rate, I admit that I am not strong enough, or rich enough, or independent enough, to live up in actuality to my ideal standards. You ask me, what are those ideal standards? Good for you. The only escape (do I sound Freudian?) from the present set up as I see it, is in the exercise of a phase of life inviolate and separate from that of my future mate, and from all males with whom I might live. I am not only jealous; I am vain and proud. I will not submit to having my life fingered by my husband, enclosed in the larger circle of his activity, and nourished vicariously by tales of his actual exploits. I must have a legitimate field of my own, apart from his, which he must respect.

So I am led to one or two choices! Can I write? Will I write if I practice enough? How much should I sacrifice to writing anyway, before I find out if I’m any good? Above all, CAN A SELFISH EGOCENTRIC JEALOUS AND UNIMAGITIVE FEMALE WRITE A DAMN THING WORTH WHILE? Should I sublimate (my, how we throw words around!) my selfishness in serving other people – through social or other such work? Would I then become more sensitive to other people and their problems? Would I be able to write honestly, then, of other beings beside a tall, introspective adolescent girl? I must be in contact with a wide variety of lives if I am not to become submerged in the routine of my own economic strata and class. I will not have my range of acquaintance circumscribed by my mate’s profession. Yet I see that this will happen if I do not have an outlet … of some sort.

Looking at myself, in the past years, I have come to the conclusion that I must, have a passionate physical relationship with someone – or combat the great sex urge in me by drastic means. I chose the former answer. I also admitted that I am obligated in a way to my family and to society (damn society anyway) to follow certain absurd and traditional customs – for my own security, they tell me. I must therefore, confine the major part of my life, to one human being of the opposite sex … that is a necessity because: I choose the physical relationship of intercourse as an animal and releasing part of life I can not gratify myself promiscuously and retain the respect and support of society, (which is my pet devil) – and because I am a woman: ergo: one root of envy for male freedom. Still being a woman, I must be clever and obtain as full a measure of security for those approaching ineligible and aging years wherein I will not have the chance to capture a new mate – or in all probability. So, resolved: I shall proceed to obtain a mate through the customary procedure: namely, marriage.

That leaves innumerable problems. Since I have grown up enough to decide to marry, I now must be very careful. I have the aforementioned blots of selflove, jealousy and pride to battle with as intelligently as possible. (No, I can not delude myself).

The selflove I can hide or reweld by the Biblical saw of “losing myself and finding myself.” For instance, I could hold my nose, close my eyes, and jump blindly into the waters of some man’s insides, submerging my-self until his purpose becomes my purpose, his life, my life, and so on. One fine day I would float to the surface, quite drowned, and supremely happy with my newfound selfless self. Or I could devote myself to a Cause. (I think that is why there are so many women’s clubs and organizations. They’ve got to feel emancipated and self important somehow. God Forbid that I become a Crusader. But I might surprise myself, and become a second Lucretia Mott or something equivalent.) Anyway, there are two tentative solutions for getting rid of selfishness – both involving a stoic casting-off of the thin tenuous little identity which I love and cherish so dearly – and being confident that, once on the other side, I shall never miss my own little ambitions for my conceited self, but shall be content in serving the ambitions of my mate, or of a society, or cause. (Yet I will not, I cannot accept any of those solutions. Why? Stubborn selfish pride. I will not make what is inevitable easier for my-self by the blinding ignorance-is-bliss “losing-and-finding” theory. Oh, no! I will go, eyes open, into my torture, and remain fully cognizant, unwinking, while they cut and stitch and lop off my cherished malignant organs.)

So much for selflove: I carry it with me like a dear cancerous relative – to be disposed of only when desperation sets in.

Now for jealousy. I can loop out of that one easily: by excelling in some field my mate cannot participate actively in, but can only stand back and admire. That’s where writing comes in. It is as necessary for the survival of my haughty sanity as bread is to my flesh. I pay the penalty of the educated, emancipated woman: I am critical, particular, aristocratic in tastes. Perhaps my desire to write could be simplified to a basic fear of non-admiration and non-esteem. Suddenly I wonder: am I afraid that the sensuous haze of marriage will kill the desire to write? Of course – in past pages I have repeated and repeated that fear. Now I am beginning to see why! I am afraid that the physical sensuousness of marriage will lull and soothe to inactive lethargy my desire to work outside the realm of my mate – might make me “lose myself in him,” as I said before, and thereby lose the need to write as I would lose the need to escape. Very simple.

If all my writing (once, I think, an outlet for an unfulfilled sensitivity – a reaction against unpopularity) is this ephermeral, what a frightening thing it is!

Let’s take pride, now. Pride is mixed in with selflove and jealously. All are rooted in the same inarticulate center of me, I think. I feed myself on the food of pride. I cultivate physical appearance – Pride. I long to excell – to specialize in one field, one section of a field, no matter how minute, as long as I can be an authority there. Pride, ambition – what mean, selfish words!

Now back again to the present – the mating problem. What is best? Choice is frightening. I do not know: this is what I want. I only can hazard guesses on those poor fellows I meet by saying “This is what I do not want.” What profession would I choose, if I were a man? Is that a criterion? To choose the man I would be if I were a man? Pretty risky. Occupation? teacher, comes closest now – liesurely enough not to drive me to madness, intelligent of course – hell, I Don’t Know! Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is most becoming?

The fact remains, I have at best three years in which to meet eligible people. Few come as close as the one I now know. I would be betting on dark horses, not on a sure thing. Yet I am disturbed rather terribly by this sure thing. I am obsessed that it is this, or nothing, and that if I don’t take this, it will be nothing, but if I do take this, I will be squeezed into a pretty stiff pattern, the rigor of which I do not like. Why not? Ah, I will tell you some of the seeds which will fester in me, sprouting dangerously under forseen conditions:

He is drawn to attractive women – even if it is not to search for a mate: – all through life I would be subject to a physical, hence animal jealously of other attractive women – always afraid that a shorter girl, one with better breasts, better feet, better hair than I will be the subject of his lust, or love – and I would always be miserably aware that I had to live up to his expectations – or else, someone else would. – A woman, confined to the home, doesn’t have the opportunity to feed her ego on attractive men.

He regards a wife as a physical possession, to be proud of, like “a new car.” Great! He is vain, proud, too. Score fault number one! He wants other people to be conscious of his valuable possession. What? You say “That’s only normal?” Maybe it is only normal, but I resent the hint – of what? of material attitude. Okay, so I don’t believe in spirit. I also don’t believe in “owning” people – like a good whore or a pet canary.

He wants, after he is dead, for a community to remember him – to admire him for a life he saved, a life he gave. No doubt that is why he wants to be a general practitioner in a small town – he could smugly and rightly consider himself the guardian of life & death and happiness of a large group of humans. (Perry would be a surgeon – so, I would have Dick be a surgeon. I am like Perry. Dick is gregarious; he loves life collectively. Perry is isolated; he loves life in the singular, not the plural.) I would have him specialize. He is not being selfless when he wants to be a country doctor – he is being proud, full of desire for self esteem and importance. He would of course need a wife (if only for physical and mental gratification, to cook meals and raise children – all purely pragmatic needs – save the mental one, which still is practical in that it involves pride again … and the satisfaction there of) – to fit in to that environment. How good would I be at small town living? I haven’t proved popular at school. My friends are a select few! How could I ever expect to be the town-minded, extroverted country doctor’s wife! God knows. I don’t. He needs the good solid homemaking type – with a little less fire, a little more practical devotion to her lord – i.e. Margaret Gordon.

Where does that leave me? In a position of awful responsibility. I can change, whittle my square edges to fit in a round hole. God, I hope I’m never going to massacre myself that way. (Oh, you say, I don’t see life’s big chance? Well maybe I just don’t see all my limitations yet, let’s leave it that way.) Or, I could tell the boy, before it is too late – warn him to set his sights on other prey – more domesticated prey, at that. Or I could just shut up and plunge – maybe making us both unhappy. Who knows? The most saddening thing is to admit that I am not in love. I can only love (if that means self denial – or does it mean self fulfillment? Or both?) by giving up my love of self and ambitions – why, why, why, can’t I combine ambition for myself and another? I think I could, if only I chose a mate with a career demanding less of a wife in the way of town and social responsibility. But God, who is to say? You God, whom I invoke without belief, only I can choose, and only I am responsible. (Oh, the grimness of atheism!)

[Appendix 1 contains Sylvia Plath’s 17–19 October 1951 journal fragment – ed.]

January 15 – 1952 Sonnet: Van Winkle’s Village

Today, although the slant of sun reminds

Of other suns, although the rooks may call

The way they did long years ago, one finds

Van Winkle’s village not the same at all …

The streets re-routed, and the citizens

Grown bland, incredulous, politely vague;

Agape, they marvel at the alien’s

Archaic jargon; with mockery they plague

His puzzled queries. The woman at the door

Of his old house is young and strange; now where

Has Peter gone? And Dirck who sat of yore

To savor beer and meerschaum on the stair?

Perplexed, Van Winkle strokes (as doubts begin)

The century old beard that wreathes his chin.

February 25 – letter excerpt:

“… can you see, through the strange dark tunnel of cupped hands to the great cyclops eye, blurred, staring, flecked with one lightspot that grows and becomes a cloud, shifting, endowed with meaning, imposed upon it. Can you feel, listening with trained ear to heartbeat of the other, the wind shrieking and gasping and singing, as one listens to the vast humming inside the paradoxical cylinder of the telephone pole? Such uncharted, wild barrens there are behind the calm or mischievous shell that has learned its name but not its destiny.

There is still time to veer, to sally forth, knapsack on back, for unknown hills over which … only the wind knows what lies. Shall she, shall she veer? There will be time, she says, knowing somehow that in her beginning is her end and the seeds of destruction perhaps now dormant may even today begin sprouting malignantly within her. She turns away from action in one direction to that in another, knowing all the while that someday she must face, behind the door of her choosing, perhaps the lady, perhaps the tiger …”

May 15 – 1952 – Dust lies along the edges of my book, and my lusts and little ideas have gone spurting out in other ways – in sonnets, in stories, and in letters. And now that the rain beats (again) closing in wetly, splashing (again) liquidly on the full, smoothly thin green leaves, trickling like cool pure urine down the drain, now I can begin to talk (again) as I always do, before exams begin, before the heat gets turned on. I shall begin by saying that I am not the girl I was a year ago. Thank Time. No, I am now a sophomore at Smith College, and therein lies all the difference. All? By implication, yes: mentally I am active as before, more realistic perhaps. (Come now, what do you mean by “realistic”?) Well, I consider myself more aware of my limitations in a constructive way. I will still whip myself onward and upward (in this spinning world, who knows which is up?) toward Fulbright’s, prizes, Europe, publication, males. Tangible, yes, after a fashion, as all weave into my physical experience – going, seeing, doing, thinking, feeling, desiring. With the eyes, the brain, the intestines, the vagina. From the inactive (collegiately), timid, introvertly-tended individual of last year, I have become altered. I have maintained my integrity by not being an office-seeker for the sake of publicity, yet I have directed my energies in channels which, although public, also perform the dual service of satisfying many of my creatives aims and needs. For example, I was elected Secretary of Honor Board⁵² this spring – sent roses, flowers. And what do I do? I work with a stimulating group of the faculty – Dean Randall, et al. I learn the inside story about academic infringements – and get character material as well. Then, I am correspondent to the “Springfield Daily News” on Press Board⁵³ – which not only nets me about $10 per month, but gives me the strange thrill of feeling typewriter keys clatter under my fingers, of seeing my write-ups appear in inches in the daily Northampton column, of knowing everything that is going on in this great organic machine of a college. Also, I am going to be on the “Smith Review”⁵⁴ next year, and hope that I can whip it out of its tailspin of this year. All, all, involve time lovingly spent. And next year, next year I will honor in English – concentrating in Creative writing. At last I will be in small classes, doing independent research, becoming intimately acquainted with my instructors! This summer – ambitiously working seven days a week at the Belmont Hotel,⁵⁵ waitressing. Thousands of people apply, and of them – I am accepted! Also, whether I kill myself in the attempt or not, I will pass my physical science requirement on my own – (never will I take it next year!) And previous to the summer, there will be days spent with my lovely mathematical Alison⁵⁶ in New York.

All, all, becomes profitable. Education is of the most satisfying and available nature. I am at Smith! Which two years ago was a doubtful dream – and that fortuitous change of dream to reality has led me to desire more, and to lash myself onward – onward. I dreamed of New York, I am going there. I dream of Europe – perhaps … perhaps.

Now there comes the physical part – and therein lies the problem. Victimized by sex is the human race. Animals, the fortunate lower beasts, go into heat. Then they are through with the thing, while we poor lustful humans, caged by mores, chained by circumstance, writhe and agonize with the apalling and demanding fire licking always at our loins.

I remember a cool river beach and a May night full of rain held in far clouds, moonly sparks raying on the water, and the close, dank, heavy wetness of green vegetation. The water was cold to my bare feet, and the mud oozed up between my toes. He ran then, on the sand, and I ran after him, my hair long and damp, blowing free across my mouth. I could feel the inevitable magnetic polar forces in us, and the tidal blood beat loud, Loud, roaring in my ears, slowing and rhythmic. He paused, then, I behind him, arms locked around the powerful ribs, fingers caressing him. To lie with him, to lie with him, burning forgetful in the delicious animal fire. Locked first upright, thighs ground together, shuddering, mouth to mouth, breast to breast, legs enmeshed, then lying full length, with the good heavy weight of body upon body, arching, undulating, blind, growing together, force fighting force: to kill? To drive into burning dark of oblivion? To lose identity? Not love, this, quite. But something else rather. A refined hedonism. Hedonism: because of the blind sucking mouthing fingering quest for physical gratification. Refined: because of the desire to stimulate another in return, not being quite only concerned for self alone, but mostly so. An easy end to arguments on the mouth: a warm meeting of mouths, tongues quivering, licking, tasting. An easy substitute for bad slashing with angry hating teeth and nails and voice: the curious musical tempo of hands lifting under breasts, caressing throat, shoulders, knees, thighs. And giving up to the corrosive black whirlpool of mutual necessary destruction. – Once there is the first kiss, then the cycle becomes inevitable. Training, conditioning, make a hunger burn in breasts and secrete fluid in vagina, driving blindly for destruction. What is it but destruction? Some mystic desire to beat to sensual annihilation – to snuff out one’s identity on the identity of the other – a mingling and mangling of identities? A death of one? Or both? A devouring and subordination? No, no. A polarization rather – a balance of two integrities, changing, electrically, one with the other, yet with centers of coolness, like stars. || (And D. H. Lawrence did have something after all –). And there it is: when asked what role I will plan to fill, I say “What do you mean role? I plan not to step into a part on marrying – but to go on living as an intelligent mature human being, growing and learning as I always have. No shift, no radical change in life habits.” Never will there be a circle, signifying me and my operations, confined solely to home, other womenfolk, and community service, enclosed in the larger worldly circle of my mate, who brings home from his periphery of contact with the world the tales only of vicarious experience to me, like so . No, rather, there will be two over-lapping circles, with a certain strong riveted center of common ground, but both with separate arcs jutting out in the world. A balanced tension; adaptible to circumstances, in which there is an elasticity of pull, tension, yet firm unity. Two stars, polarized: like so, in moments of communication that is complete, almost, like so, almost fusing onto one. But fusion is an undesirable impossibility – and quite non-durable. So there will be no illusion of that.

So he accuses me of “struggling for dominance”? Sorry, wrong number. Sure, I’m a little scared of being dominated. (Who isn’t? Just the submissive, docile, milky type of individual. And that is Not he, Not me.) But that doesn’t mean I, ipso facto, want to dominate. No, it is not a black-and-white choice or alternative like: “Either-I’m-victorious on-top-or-you-are.” It is only balance that I ask for. Not the continual subordination of one persons desires and interests to the continual advancement of another’s! That would be too grossly unfair

Let’s get to the bottom of his question: Why is he so afraid of my being strong and assertive? Why has he found it necessary to be himself so aggressive and positive in planning and directing actions and events? Could it be because he has a “mother complex”? Just what is his relation toward his mother anyway? She has become a matriarch in the home – a sweet, subtle matriarch, to be sure, but nonetheless, a “Mom”. (cf. Philip Wylie – “Generation of Vipers”.) She has become ruler of finances, manager of the home, “mother” of her husband, who, even to my unschooled eye, has a striking amount of the characteristics of a small, childish, irresponsible boy – who can sulk, beg for service, attention, encouragement, and get it. (Handsome, somewhat vain, but still in the position very often of a schoolboy.) It is she who takes over the responsibility of facing reality. Not that this relationship, either, is so black-and-white, but that there are these elements in it, and they are important to illustrate my argument. Therefore, I accentuate them. She has, then, had a great influence over her sons. The one I am concerned with admits that he thinks he rebelled against the firm opinionated influence and made a tangible break by seducing a waitress, a Vassar girl, or what have you. Is there not a sort of duality, then, in him – a desire born of childhood, to be “mothered,” to be a child, suckling at the breast (a transfer of eroticism from mother to girlfriend) – and yet to escape the subtle feminine snare and be free of the insidious feminine domination he has sensed in his home all these years: to assert his independent unattached virile vigor (and push his career to the utmost.) He does not seem to be particularly close to or admiring of his father. Is he subconsciously and consciously trying simultaneously to break out of a pattern that would imply following in his father’s foot steps – and ricochet to the opposite end of the spectrum by imposing his own pattern on his wife. “I have my own career all marked out,” he says somewhat defensively. It would seem so. It would seem he is building a protective wall around him to secure him from the matriarchal dominance which he is probably trying to escape from.

He would then be selfish – admitting also that he has never loved anybody. Why? Is he as afraid to give of himself, compromise, and sacrifice as I am? Quite possibly. He also, as I do to a certain extent, has a superiority complex … which often generates condescending and patronizing attitudes that I find extremely offensive. Also, in spite of the fact that he has tried with a vengeance to enter into my appreciation of art and my writing interests – to actually do and not just appreciate, (Is that a sign that he must compete and master me – symbolic, what?) he recently states that a poem “is so much inconsequential dust.” With that attitude, how can he be so hypocritical as to pretend he likes poetry? Even some kinds of poetry? The fact remains that writing is a way of life to me: And writing not just from a pragmatic, money-earning point of view either. Granted, I consider publication a token of value and a confirmation of ability – but writing takes practice, continual practice. And if publication is not tangible immediately, if “success” is not forthcoming, would he force me into a defensive attitude about my passionate avocation? Would I be forced to give it up, cut it off? Undoubtedly, as the wife of such a medical man as he would like to be, I would have to. I do not believe, as he and his friends would seem to, that artistic creativity can best be indulged in masterful singleness rather than in marital cooperation. I think that a workable union should heighten the potentialities in both individuals. And so when he says “I am afraid the demands of wifehood and motherhood would preoccupy you too much to allow you to do the painting and writing you want …” The fear, the expectancy is planted. And so I start thinking, maybe he’s right. Maybe all those scared and playful stream-of-consciousness letters were just touching again and again at this recurring string of doubt and premonition. As it stands now, he alternately denies and accepts me, as I silently do him. There is sometimes a great destructive, annihilating surge of negative fear and hate and recoiling: “I can’t, I won’t.” And then there are long talks, patient, questioning, the physical attraction, soothing again, pacifying, lulling. “I love you.” “Don’t say that. You don’t really. Remember what we said about the word Love.” “I know, but I love this girl, here and now, I don’t know who she is, but I love her.” There is always coming again strongly the feeling as frantic in another way – really, what if I should deny this and never meet anyone as satisfying or, (as I have been hoping) better? To use a favorite metaphor: It is as if both of us, wary of oysters so rich and potent and at once digestively dangerous as they are, should agree to each swallow an oyster (our prospective mate) tied to a string (our reserve about committing ourselves. Then, if either or both of us found the oyster disagreeing with our respective digestive systems, we could yank up the oyster before it was too late, and completely assimilated in all its destructive portent (with marriage.) Sure, there might be a little nausea, a little regret, but the poisoning, corrosive, final, destructive, would not have had a chance to set in. And there we are: two scared, attractive, intelligent, dangerous, hedonistic, “clever” people.

So, weighing danger, I find it carries the balance. (He probably will, too.) Therefore I say “Je ne l’épouserai jamais! JAMAIS, JAMAIS!” And even there the doubts begin – if you find no one else as complete, as satisfying? If you spend the rest of your life bitterly regretting your choice? A choice you must make. And soon. Which will have the courage to be first? If I met someone I could love, it would be so painless. But I doubt if I will be that lucky again. Could I change my attitude & subordinate gladly to his life? Thousands of women would! It would depend on-fear-of-being-an-old-maid and sex-urge being strong enough. They aren’t, at nineteen, (although the latter is pretty potent.) So there I am – if I could only say with faith: somewhere there is a man I could love and give of myself to with trust and without fear. If only. Then I wouldn’t cling so desperately and strangely to this one beautiful intelligent, sensual human companion as I do. Or he to me. But desiring human flesh, companionship – “How we need that security! How we need another soul to cling to. Another body to keep us warm! To rest and trust …” I said so for Bob. I say it now again. How many men are left? How many more chances will I have? I don’t know. But at nineteen I will take the risk and hope that I will have another chance or two!

July 6 – 1952. Outwardly, all one could see on passing by is a tan, long-legged girl in a white lawn chair, drying her light brown hair in the late afternoon July sun, dressed in aqua shorts and a white-and-aqua halter. The sweat stands out in wet shining drops on her lean bare midriff, and trickles periodically in sticky streams down under her armpits and in back of her legs. To look at her, you couldn’t tell much: how in one short month of being alive she has begun and loved and lost a job, made and foolishly and voluntarily cut herself off from several unique friends, met and captivated a Princeton boy,⁵⁷ won one of two $500 prizes in a national College Fiction Contest⁵⁸ and received a delightful, encouraging letter from a well-known publisher⁵⁹ who someday “hopes to publish a novel she has written.” There she sits, lazy, convalescent, sweating in the hot sun to maker her hair lighter, her skin darker. Tonight she will dress in the lovely white sharkskin hand-me-down dress of her last summer’s employer and gaze winningly at her entranced Princeton escort over drinks and music, under a full moon. To look at her, you might not guess that inside she is laughing and crying, at her own stupidities and luckinesses, and at the strange enigmatic ways of the world which she will spend a lifetime trying to learn and understand.

Monday July 7 – Last night was good, not so good as the night before, because of the reversal, the balancing of roles. Saturday, after a try at a tennis rally in the hot July sun, with the saliva thickening in your mouth and the desperate and treacherous weakness of your limbs, he was stopping the car by the house and saying, “Well, are you going back to bed tonight after all this exertion?” “No,” you say, getting out. “How about doing something tonight, then. A flick, maybe?” “Sure, love to.” “I’ll call.” He drives off, and you run in, upstairs. Your eyelids are heavy, they dip, lift, dip again. You just about manage to strip and get into the shower and out and onto the bed. He does call, and you run downstairs, eager, in your thin blue cotton night gown, your bare feet feeling the slight film of dust and grit on the linoleum floor. He wants to see “Kind Hearts and Coronets” and Somerset Maughm’s “Quartet.” So do you. When he comes, you are fresh and apple-scented in the lovely shimmering tie-silk dress with the lavendar design on the silvery-beige background. He is protectively chivalrous, opening car doors, shutting them, and you think of Southern breeding. The drive is lovely, into Boston in the clear soft light of late sun still, and the leaves green and full, with the faint pink dust rising, layers of it looking liquid, drifting as through levels of clear champagne. Boston streets, Kenmore Square, and the carpeted, gilt-adorned palace interior of the theater, where in the darkness you find two seats, whisper a remark or two, and go lifting, speeding into the great moving magic of the silver screen which pulls all into itself, lulling with the magnetic other-worldliness all who sit in adoration before it. 11 The collection is taken discreetly at the door by the gaunt, gray-haired man in the scarlet uniform with the crust of gold braid, and the worshipers are ushered to their cushioned pews in reverent darkness. No matter if they are late; the service is continuous, and if the beginning of the first mass is missed, one may stay through the beginning of the second to achieve full continuity. In the democratic twilight, the clothes of the patrons are not in evidence. If Mrs. Allan’s hat is out of taste, if Mac the cabdriver snores through the dull first lesson or the news reel, if Mamie and Joe nuzzle each other playfully, fondly in response to the sermon of a screen kiss, there is no one to be censorious, no one who really minds. For this is the altar at which more Americans spend their time and money, daily, nightly, than ever before. Here the mystic incense of the traditional popcorn, chewing gum and chocolate, of mixed perfume and whiskey smells is neutralized and cooled by the patented air-conditioning system. And here people can lose their identity in a splurge of altruism before the twentieth century god. His messengers, his missionaries are everywhere. Dark in the room above your heads, one runs the machine; reel after vibrating reel of divine life circles under his direction onto the mammoth screen, playing forth the drama, the life force, the Bible of the masses. Rave notices are circulated in the newspapers. Everybody reads them. Sex and slaughter are substituted for the sin and sulphur of the pulpits, now quite antiquated. Instead of watching a man dictate manners and morals, you watch the very workings of these manners and morals in an artificially constructed society which to you, is real. Which, to all the worshipers, is the most wonderful and temporary reality they could ever hope to know. The liquid, gleaming lips of movie actresses quiver in kiss after scintillating kiss; full breasts lift under lace, satin, low scallops: sex incarnate, (and the male worshiper feels his mouth go thick and sweat start, and the fire start burning in his loins. If he is with a girl, he puts his arm around her maybe, thinking of how her breasts would feel if maybe he could feed her a few too many beers – there’s that place down by the river where the kids go parking and if he got started …) The male actor says “C’mere, baby,” and his voice is rough, brash, intimate, and his strong arm bends behind her soft body, forcing her to him, against the muscular length of him, standing there, proud and virile … (and the female worshiper goes limp, thinking how good it would feel if only Johnny got tough, even if it was just playing, now and then, and pretended he was really going out for her in a big way – she could let her hair fall over one eye a little, and if she tucked in her blouse tighter, maybe pulled the neckline down a little lower, leaning toward him, maybe he would get started …)

So there it is, the Fire Sermon, and the choruses and responses, all to the music and the hymns, the superterrestrial, supercollosal paens to the good guy, the good girl, the sex organs of America … bigger & better marriages these days and more often please.

Sidetracking, that was. Now to the subject at hand which is not a lecture, nor yet, supposedly, an analogy between the church and the cinema, but rather a sketch of two people reacting together: a Princeton boy and a Smith girl.

At the movies, they laughed, long and delightedly together, for the films were British, intelligent, deft and mature – (no gorgeous women in WAVE uniforms doing variety can-cans on deck, or soft hatted men looking tough in plaid lumbershirts on a rearing horse –.)

His arm rested for a little on the back of her chair, and his hand, now and then, tightened appreciatively on her shoulder, and she wanted very badly for him to hold her in his arms because it was a long while since she had been made love to, and then it had been quite thoroughly and wonderfully. But she said no to herself, and again no. She would discipline her tender and desiring libido – but ah, how young and fair was his face, lean, boyish, with the full mouth and the strong, firm, young chin that could assert itself with an almost vegetable delicacy and resiliancy. His voice above all, clear, young, drawling southernly just now and then … it was lights, dark, an attempt to find some place to go dancing … a drive to his home and gingerale in a stylishly sunken pale blue livingroom, large, with all manner of divans, rugs, windowseats, patterned curtains. Going home at one o’clock, he did not put his glasses on, but drove with arm around girl, pulling her to him, her head upon his shoulder. He kissed her hand. “That was sweet of you to do,” she said, quite charmed. “You are sweet, too. Sweet and nice. You know that, don’t you?” She felt suddenly sweet and nice. “Sometimes I have to be told,” she replied huskily. The car glided up before her house. A pale, jaundiced full moon shone in a clear yellow aura of light through the dark of pine trees. He pulled her to him, saying intensely, “I don’t know, I don’t know what it is. I’ve never felt this way before with any other girl.… more than anything else in the world,” he whispered, his soft, young, boyish cheek against hers, “I want to love you.” She let him kiss her once, pulled reluctantly away, thinking: The power, the power of the life force. Exulting inwardly, she walked to the door with him. 11 In her, beating loudly, strongly, was the neutral fact: the potent sex drive. It could be used for either her triumph or her downfall. It could be her most dynamic asset or her most tragic flaw. (Which?… the lady or the tigress? ten years should tell.)

Sunday, lately, at twilight, he called for her, driving again into the city in the lovely pale summer dusk, laced in colored neon with tiers of lights, blinking, syncopating in the dark, and the girl cool and brown, longlimbed, in a princess-styled white sharkskin dress, circular full skirt rustling like stiff cream over a starched crinoline, laughing delightedly inside herself at the wonder of being nineteen and going into town with a tall adorably opinionated Princetonian, cradled by the smooth plush rocking of a blue automobile, and lulled by canned music sounding from the lighted arc of the radio face on the dashboard. (Remind her of all the times she scored material comforts as beastly and self-corrupting, and she would laugh throatily at you, and lean back to look down under her lashes as she has learned to do lately, and murmur: “And is not all of life material – based on the material – permeated by the material –? Should not one learn, gladly, to utilize the beauty of the fine material? I do not speak of the gross crudities of soporific television, of loud brash convertibles and vulgar display – but rather of grace and line and refinement – and there are wonderful and exciting things that only money can by, such as theater tickets, books, paintings, travel, lovely clothes, – and why deny them when one can have them? The only problem is to work, to stay awake mentally and physically – and NEVER to become mentally, physically, or spiritually flabby or over-complacent!”) Disembarking in Copley Square they walk up in front of the Copley Plaza, under the brilliantly lighted awning, into the tall wide hallway where, to the left, there is a darkened room – – – he pushes the door open, peers into the dim carpeted interior. The girl follows, laughing softly and excitedly. There are empty chairs set helter-skelter about a smooth square polished floor where, he tells her, seizing her gaily by the waist and spinning her about in a waltz turn, they sometimes have dances. Laughing, hand in hand, they leave the unlighted room and cross over to the bar where there is more canned music coming, synthetic and formless, over loudspeakers concealed partially in the curtains along the wall. The bar itself is on the left wall as they come in, with the great mirrors reflecting all the glassy bottles, tall, thin, short, fat, holding, cradling clear fluids – ruby, garnet, gold, transparent, and the bartenders, whiteclad, red faced, slouched dozing behind the counter. The room is quiet, with only a few people sitting on the floor at tables with umbrellas over them, in a poor imitation of a Paris sidewalk cafe – and no one sitting on the slowly revolving raised platform in the center of the room with the strange plush couches (like an S, with the two seats in each curve, facing each other, and a slight swelling in the middle for a table, with a brass pole going up for the scalloped top of the merry-go-round) – all turning very quietly and sweetly, all well-oiled. And the girl clutches his arm, “Oh,” she says, “Oh, we must sit up there. Where we can see all the people.” So he smiles, and takes her by the hand, leading her up the steps of the merrygoround to one of the strange s-shaped divans, and they sit down facing each other, quite pleased with themselves, because they are both so young, so ambitious, so intelligent and attractive. The waiter comes up, subservient, bent over his pad solicitously. “What’ll you have?” the boy asks the girl. She doesn’t know; she is very ignorant about the names of drinks. “You order for me,” she suggests sweetly, pleadingly. “Something I’ll like.” “Scotch-and-soda … I mean water,” he says “Do you want soda or water with yours?” he asks. She says soda, because it sounds better, more familiar, and the waiter goes off. They talk, then, (about life and how children are influenced and conditioned by their parents, how he went on camping trips, how he was elected Personnel Manager for the Nassau, Vice-President of Whig-Cliosophic Society – and postponed his history paper on Belgian neutrality, of how his grand-father bought rare antiques instead of storing money away because it was more secure that way, of how, of how she had gotten a favorable notice from a publisher who had read the proofs of one of her stories … and on and on, easily sliding in and out of a plethora of topics as college people do.) The drinks are brought, and the girl is inside herself frightened by the sight of what seems a trayful of glasses and bottles and colored plastic sticks. What to do with all of the glassy glitter and tinkle? Wait, she says to herself, and the waiter asks “Shall I mix them?” “Yes,” the boy says, and the girl sits back, relieved, smiling to herself secretly as the waiter pours from a green glass bottle of what must be soda into a glass part full of an amber liquid which must be scotch. The waiter evaporates, then, quite neatly into thin air, and they talk and talk, and sip their drinks. When they are through, he orders another round, (and although suddenly behind her eyes there is a rising core of blur and once in a while the laugh comes out and chokes a word which wasn’t quite pronounced the way it should have been, she is all right) and then it is later than they thought, so they step down from the very sweetly revolving well-oiled plush merry-go-round (after he has deftly paid the bill, expertly left an unobtrusive tip) and are out in the street once more … At the door, after he has driven her home, he takes her in his arms and kisses her on the mouth, (perhaps because he knows the blur is still there behind her dark eyes and that her mouth wants very badly to be kissed.) and she looks up as his mouth stays for a warm, wet moment on hers and can see his eyes are shut, the plane of his cheek hollowed, as if he were in a brief ecstatic world, drawing into himself a delicious and sweet sustenance. Then he let go and briskly, gaily, was off down the walk. The girl closed the door, and stood inside in the dark hall, her head against the cool smooth woodwork, listening to the car start outside, and drive away. She stood there motionless for a long while, her eyes shut, remembering hungrily the way his quivering young mouth had felt, and listening to the backsurging quiet of the night thickening, congealing around her in her loneliness and longing like an imprisoning envelope of gelatin …

July 10, Thursday: For three weeks I worked at the Belmont, waitressing in Side Hall, learning about people like Mrs. York and Mrs. Sanders; Ray, the coffeeman; the toast-man; Marietta, the housemother; Mr. & Mrs. Kinsley, the caretaker and the head of chambermaids; Oscar, the birdlike, picayune, humorous band leader, and Guy, and Ray, and Vulgar Charlie; August, the handsome, soft-shirted hairdresser who had been smoking against the rules for six years now; beautiful and faultless small dearly built Betsy Buck; dark-haired, spunky roommate Polly;⁶⁰ sharp, intelligent, mercenary, unscrupulous and dry-humored Gloria; brilliant, ebullient medical student Ray Wunderlich⁶¹ of Columbia Medical School with his memory engrams; homely, intelligent lawstudent Art Kramer⁶² with his $100 a week job at the Blossoms’ millionaire homestead as night-attendant; handsome, garrulous Italian Gappy; stoic-faced Harvard law student and straight-backed busboy Clark Williams; handsome Bronx bastard (“legitimate”) Lloyd Fisher from Dartmouth Med who told you some of the facts of life; Dave, the strange, fat red-faced Roast Cook; Ghris, the twinkly eyed second-cook; Mrs. Johnson, the tall, sharp Irish chef’s wife with the acid brogue and the fiery temper – I could go on and on. And then there was the beach, and sun, and Dick and the late dates, and the heat and the black-uniforms – and the final fatal sinus infection.

Saturday night, the last one to be spent at the Belmont, in spite of a sore throat and sluggish apathy, I roused myself to have a final fling before I came down with whatever I was coming down with. (My Princetonian charming called quite wonderfully and unexpectedly, saying he was down for the weekend and would I like to go out.) So after waiting on at supper, I dashed back after 8, threw off my sweaty, longsleeved black uniform, my heavy shoes, ripped off my stockings, showered, shaved, perfumed and powdered, and donned my swish aqua strapless cotton with the little jacket. A pearl choker, white ballet shoes and white topper completed the ensemble, and very brown and very excited, I walked out to the parking lot to meet my escort.

The Mill Hill Club was big, commercialized, with a band, dance floor, and a continuous round of aggressive entertainment, so we sat, side by side, in a leatherette booth by an open window with a view of pines and a slice of lemon colored moon – listening to a birdlike man hammering hell out of a banjo, a great girl vocalist, and a splendid mimic. Singing, drinking, dancing, laughing (me in his arms, close, hot, banged into by people, crushed together, someone’s heel prodding your calf, my elbow in a strangers ribs … his face, strange too in the light, looking down, laughing, smiling into mine, lips, seeking to kiss, laughter always, and knowing he liked the way I was, gay and tanned and glowing …) we passed the hours. Next day, (foolishly, I thought,) I made an afternoon date for tennis.

All that night, coughing, fevered, I couldn’t sleep, but lay in the narrow bed, with the faint grit of sand I never could quite get off the sheets, and stared at the swatch of winking stars I could see over the roof of the boys’ dorm. They shone, calm and mocking, through the thin filmy nylon stockings hung up in the window to dry. All the pros and cons and nasty, mealy-mouthed fears and dreads went swarming through my teeming, seething brain. The sickness I felt had reached a crisis; it was not turning back as I had hoped, but was, rather, advancing steadily. What to do? Whom to turn to? Where to go? What to tell Phil today? And so the morning came, and with it the verbal birth of an idea that had been sprouting in my subconscious all along at the sight of Wellesley-dwelling Princetonian. Why not, why not – go home with him and recuperate there? In peace and quiet!

A trip to the doctor’s Sunday morning in the Belmont truck with tall, skinny blond Jack Harris, whose skin is always pink and peeling, and witty, big Pat Mutrie who can have you laughing just with a word, with a look. Bumping along, feeling hot and messy, over the country Cape roads, finally to come to the office of Doctor Norris Orchard who was frail, white-haired, like a kindly red faced bird. He hopped about, peering into my sinuses and down my throat, saying, “Well, dear, it may break your little heart, but I think you should go home for a few days to recuperate.” Jubilant at his strategic and official confirmation of my plan, I drove back to the Belmont and threw all manner of clothes into my little black suit case – bathing suit, dirty pajamas, tennis shorts, and even a date dress and pearls just in case I should get well fast enough … and Phil should chance to ask me out! I squared things away with Mr. Driscoll, who was questioning and curt, and ran out to the parking lot where Phil’s car had just pulled in.

“Er … Phil …” I begin brightly, leaning on the windowsill and gazing in at him and the good-looking lean blond boy beside him, both of them dressed in tennis shorts … “ah … Phil, how would you like company on the way home?”

A queer look passes over his face, and the other boy (Rodger⁶³) starts laughing. “What happened?” Phil asks. “Did you get fired?”

“No. I just have got to go home to get some penicillin shots. Doctor’s orders.” That sounds official.

“Well, sure,” he says.

“Can I get in now? I’ve got all my things?” So I run up and get the absurd little black suit case and, for some odd reason, my tennis racket. Fortunately for me it is starting to rain. No tennis, thank God.

I get in between the two boys and we drive off. Suddenly everything is very funny, very ridiculous. We are all laughing, and Rodger is looking over his glasses down his cute nose, pulling my hair, and being a hacker in general.

“We are going to pick up The Weasel,” he says.

“The Weasel?” I ask. I look scared. He laughs.

So we drive into a driveway by a big white house with a lot of pillars. “It’s all pillars,” I observe brightly. That, it seems is the name of the place: The Pillars. It also seems this is where the millionaire lives. Art Kramer’s millionaire. (Weasel, it develops, is the millionaire’s Princetonian chauffeur.)

So Art comes out, in a suit, smiling in his endearing simian fashion, and leaning against the car. It is a small world. Then Weasel comes out, blond, blue-eyed, and in shirt sleeves. Not bad, but with a definite aura of weaselishness about him. He comes bearing gifts: beer cans. Full, too. He jumps into the back seat and we are off.

This time there is a great deal of laughing, and Rodge is trying to explain to Weasel how “This girl is the coolest thing I’ve seen yet; she comes up waving this pitiful little piece of paper, some doctor saying she should go home, and she goes home like she needs a vacation or something!” We stop for ice, and drive to a beach where there is a parking lot by sanddunes, and a view of witchgrass, and the rain coming down hard on a dirty, sodden, gray green sea.

The beer tastes good to my throat, cold and bitter, and the three boys and the beer and the queer freeness of the situation make me feel like laughing forever. So I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the top of the beer can. I am looking very healthy and flushed and bright eyed, having both a good tan and a rather excellent fever.

We drop off the other two boys, then, and start the three-hour drive back to Wellesley through the pouring rain. It is comfortable, being with Phil, and there is a lot to talk about. The only trouble is that my voice is beginning to leave me. It must be the dampness or something, but the pitch is about an octave lower. So I decide philosophically to make the best of it and pretend I naturally have a very husky, sexy low voice: I’ve never had it so good.

We pick up Phil’s dog, a spoiled big-eyed black cocker spaniel who sits with us in the front seat, looking very sad and very loving. Phil pats her, and so do I. Our hands meet, and he absently pats mine. I think all of a sudden maybe I could get very fond of this guy after all.

I get out of the car when it pulls up in front of the little white house I haven’t seen for almost three weeks. I am suddenly very tired, very hungry. I say goodbye to Phil who asks if I want to go out that night. “No, Phil, thanks.” He doesn’t understand. I am going to be very sick. “Tennis tomorrow?” No, again.

Mother and Warren look up, startled, as I walk in. “Hello,” I croak gaily. “I’m home for a visit.” Mother smiles and says “Wait till I tell grammy! She dreamed you were coming home last night!” (As Frost said, Home is where when you go there, they have to take you in!”)

July 11, Friday. A recuperation, tedious, with shots of penicillin, and now I have been breathing quite well for a week. The Belmont called up early one morning, and mother answered. They wanted to know definitely when I’d be coming back so they could hire another girl in the interim. (Some devilish split part in my personality had been whispering to me all week subconsciously: “Why go back? You’re tired, fagged out, and the work is getting rough – no days off, pay not especially good. Then, too, only a few people who really like you. Why not stay home for the summer – rest, get your science done, write, go out with Phil, play tennis. You can afford to loaf. You deserve to, what with winning one of the two big prizes in Mademoiselle’s College Fiction Contest with “Sunday at the Mintons’ ” so take a break for once. Sinusitis is such a beautiful excuse.”) So the devil got into my vocal chords and I started prompting mother – “Say you don’t know when I’ll be well … that I’m still miserable … that I loved it there, but maybe it would be more convenient to get some one else.” So mother said so, and they said they were sorry as everybody liked me, but they would get someone else. We looked at each other in dubious triumph.

Twenty-four hours later I got a letter from Polly and from Pat M. (saying how they missed me) from Art Kramer (saying how seeing me that day gave him just enough courage to want to ask me out) and from the Editor-in-Chief of Alfred Knopf, Publishers (saying how he liked the advance proofs of my story “Sunday at the Mintons’ ” which is coming out in Mile and how he’d like to publish a novel [!] by me sometime in the future.) That little packet was IT: all I needed to start me raring to live again. In that brief interval I cursed myself for stupidly getting out of the Belmont job – for losing Ray, Art, Polly, Gloria – and all the might-have-beens: the wonderful-people-I-might-have-met-but didn’t. And the beach 4 hours a day, and the swimming. And the tan & blond sunbleached hair. I was glum, morose, thinking: why didn’t I tell them I’d be back in two weeks: then I could have rested completely and had a little social vacation in the bargain! (Fool. Fool. Damn Fool.)

And then I began to understand the difference between death-or-sickness-in-life as versus Life. When sick (both physically, as symptoms showed, and mentally, as I was trying to escape from something) I wanted to withdraw from all the painful reminders of vitality – to hide away alone in a peaceful stagnant pool, and not be like a crippled stick entangled near the bank of a jubilantly roaring river, torn at continually by the noisy current. So I went home, knowing that if I did so it would be hard to come back. The horrible exertion of forcing myself back into the current persisted all during the worst days of my depressing sinus infection – and the call came 24 hours too early. Then came the switch in attitude: Out of all the rationalizing, all the intellectual balancing of pros and cons, it comes down to the fact that when you are alive and vital, competition and striving with and among people overbalances everything else. No matter how logically I had reasoned out about the Belmont being dangerous for my health, unremunerative in proportion to the work performed, impossible as far as science study was concerned – still the magnetic whirlpool of slender, lovely young devils called and called to me above all. Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not-writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing – singing, laughing, learning. The responsibility, the awful responsibility of managing (profitably) 12 hours a day for 10 weeks is rather overwhelming when there is nothing, noone, to insert an exact routine into the large unfenced acres of time – which it is so easy to let drift by in soporific idling and luxurious relaxing. It is like lifting a bell jar off a securely clockwork-like functioning community, and seeing all the little busy people stop, gasp, blow up and float in the inrush, (or rather outrush,) of the rarified scheduled atmosphere – poor little frightened people, flailing impotent arms in the aimless air. That’s what it feels like: getting shed of a routine. Even though one has rebelled terribly against it, even then, one feels uncomfortable when jounced out of the repetitive rut. And so with me. What to do? Where to turn? What ties, what roots? as I hang suspended in the strange thin air of back-home?