Thurs May 5 - 66 Study hall but no one’s studying. The proctor is either dead or asleep. Aynsley got a disturbing chain letter about buying a bus for negro voters. She feels bad about breaking the chain but she lives in Wallace country and can’t think of anyone to send the letter to. She’s just taking names out of the of the phone book. I am trying to read Zoe Oldenbourg’s Catherine the Great. She accuses Catherine of lying In her memoirs. If she insists on that kind of honesty we are all doomed from the start. Clearly we see ourselves as sympathetic characters, which is automatically different from the way we appear to everyone else! I have tried writing my memoirs countless times. Beales says I have an exaggerated sense of self-importance but better that than no sense at all. Sun May 8 – 66 I’m in love with 5 boys, none of whom is Beales. I can’t get away from him, we are shackled by invisible chains. Each of us alternately bores and torments the other but it is too late to break up. (Plus he wouldn’t believe me.) I am starting to get a grudging respect for this school’s apparent policy to put you through a series of bad marriages before you actually go out in the world so at least you won’t make THOSE mistakes. I mean, after all, those Grab Anyone Who’s Going mistakes are the most obvious ones. Poor Beales is unrelentingly cynical, insulting and gloomy. He seems to have decided in advance that Harvard will be awful so there is nothing one can say. I was fooling around with Hale & Dawkins at the Gifsto the other day and I stole a penny from Hale and he told me now I had to go out on a date with him. Dawkins said I could have fifteen dates with him for the same price! If only. Then there’s Blair Manteo who’s tall and dark and thin as a knife. He is my biology partner so we are always having to go outside together to check on the chickens. We sneak up and down the stairs pretending we are James Bond. (Beales refuses to play like that.) Then there’s Travis Kitchener who walked all the way around the school with me clinging to the window ledged. When I almost fell he grabbed me and stared deeply into my eyes! “I don’t know how girls can stand the way he looks at them,” complains Beales! Travis promised to take me helicopter skiing in the “Persian Alps” someday – as good as a proposal! Thurs May 26, 66 HAD to break up with Beales – he just went too far! Said he’s going to date Genevieve because she’ll be the only person he knows at Radcliffe. (All he’ll find out is she’s different from me.) I said that’s it, buster! I know he was just goading me – even promised to “do better” but I was glad of the excuse. He sent me a formal invitation to his graduation and wrote on it “I hope I haven’t mucked up your year like you mucked up the end of mine!” What an Eeyore. I told him brutally he is impossible to get close to and I’m tired of giving more than I get. He said, “You’re right.” Now he hopes I will pity him but its not going to work. He then asked me to Casper the Grasper’s rose garden party. I told Beales I am going with Blair Manteo. I will wear my strawberry linen dress. Blair rescued me and I am really grateful. Because I’m not seeing Beales I have lots of time for other things. Reading Shelley Mydans’ Thomas, The Leopard, and Hercules My Shipmate. All this historical stuff has inspired me to write a novel entitled To Command or Hold Your Peace. About Napoleon. Fleur has moved in not that I am unattached. She calls herself a clinging vine and I am fending her off which is difficult because she is a long distance crier. She can sit through an entire meal looking at me and crying. Te staff does nothing. It is happy people like me who are constantly chastised and badgered. 6-6-66 (Obviously a significant day.) Got into all sorts of trouble for skipping the special math study hall designed to pass fools like me -,didn’t know it was required. Mr. Benson says I am very disobedient – I said my attitude is not one of disobedience but negation. Needless to say he didn’t understand. I can study after dinner. I’ll be fine if they don’t ask for too many square roots. I’ve got to get out of this hellhole. Try to talk my parents into sending me to an art school but every time I bring it up Dad threatens to send me to Catholic military school because Plumly is “the most progressive school in the universe.” This CAN’T be true. All the seniors are deteriorating on their way to graduation. Genevieve has stopped lecturing me on sex (“stay out of classrooms with boys!!!”) Beales says he is suicidal ( he is not my problem any more) and the girl who fell from the window BROKE HER BACK AND WILL NEVER WALK AGAIN! Imagine what she is thinking lying in the hospital staring up at the ceiling! No school is worth this. Two boys who were graduating cum laude have been suspended and another one expelled but I’m not sure of the facts since the headmaster is a notorious liar (and proud of it. That’s “leadership”. All honest communication in this foxhole goes One Way Only. Casey says they were screwing the headmaster’s wife but this is impossible. She has baked, served and eaten more doughnuts than are good for her in her academic career. Our boys are (horribly) choosy. Another out-of-body experience in German class. I died for fifteen minutes. No vital signs, no memory, nothing. Preserving my sanity is becoming very difficult in this milieu. I have a permanent headache that is like a wrinkle in my skull. For protection I am wearing only white. Met myself on the stairs today and am thinking of writing about it. Thurs. June 9 – 66 Yahoo! Summer is officially here and I am FREE! Mom & Dad aren’t coming till tomorrow night so I have noting to do but take walks, pack, and try to avoid Blair who is becoming a little much for me. He moves with such incredible slowness and he has to have all my ideas exhaustively explained to him. He likes to read Ezra Pound’s poetry out loud while I lie under a tree with my eyes shut. Since this is the only thing we share I’m afraid to tell him I just don’t like Ezra Pound. I don’t think he can stomach Millay. Oh dear. While he talks my inner music plays Let’s Get Lost on a Country Road by the Kit Kats. Speaks to my condition as they say. Merrill’s wedding June 16 – we have nightmarishly ugly bridesmaid dresses to wear – Mom had them made by some disabled woman she took pity on. We are the ones deserving of pity for having to wear the damn things. Mon Jun 27 – 66 Here I am at the University of Minnesota! I’ve hit the big time! I would not be writing at all but we are in the basement because of a tornado warning. Ah, the joys of the Midwest. Just us theatre students and a bunch of nuns who wear funny underwear and caps with strings. You wouldn’t think there would be an order of theatre nuns would you! Well there are! They are called the Franciscans and I must say they are making the idea of the convent look attractive. (Not the clothes though. But there is talk of fixing those.) They even have a swimming pool which Mimi my roommate and I sneak into – naked – in the middle of the night. A fat one named Sister Glory is praying out loud. They told us to bring “something valuable on our way down so of course I brought you! Next time I will bring a blanket and pillows (the floor is very hard.) Writing hard too because whatever I put down is played back in my brain very discouragingly. I am studying Acting One, Fencing, Makeup and Fencing. I love theatre people! (even uns.)But we don’t spend nearly as much time on those as on building theatre sets – obviously we are Slave Labor. This is even worse because the slaves didn’t pay to work. So far the only thing I’ve learned is how to mix “dope” to stiffen unbleached muslin into walls. This will take me far in life. As usual my intellectual life is alive. Reading The Carpetbaggers in which sex warps into hate (Beales!) Turgenev’s Hunting Sketches (adore!) and The Prince, which is sort of a drag. I am Mrs. Smith in The Bald Soprano. The director asked us when our periods are due before casting. (He is very superstitious.)
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Alysse Aallyn
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