Plush Palace – 6:45 PM Fri 21 Apr 78
Wonderful walk along Powder Mill Road thinking about the mystique of money. I eternally fight a rearguard action. M & D call at noon – Genevieve had little girl – Belinda. Avril delivers my new lens – bounce notice in mail – I tear my hair in a frenzy. I get to dance 2 sets for GiGi - $200 – she tells me about her night of sin with Louie. And she wants another one. Life’s a soap opera. Management says there’s going to be a drug raid with dressing room search warrant. Panic among the girls – but not me. Check out the customers with a more intense interest. Are they here? Everyone planning to leave town except me. I offer to work tomorrow night. Reading an interesting study of Iris Murdoch novels – the Disciplined Heart. Too much coffee – I’m switching to tomato juice. Sat night – 22 Apr 78 8:30 PM My whole body hurts from dancing 5 nights in a row. It’s not good for tips, either. Poor May Sarton is trying to exorcise Eliz Bowen. Good luck with that! Elizabeth so contemptuous of “schoolgirl crushes”! Real love in EB’s world seems strangely synonymous with corruption & loss. Old fashioned view and more male really – “ejaculate” and die. We women get children, poems & novels out of it. A. stood up for dinner by Shoulders. Uh oh. Beginning of the end. Apparently saying “yes” is fatally unsexy. She & I will be eating her pot roast tomorrow – fine with me. Fatima came down early but Lori refused to go up, pointing to her watch! Much excitement & hissing. 7:45 PM – Mon. 24 Apr 78 Good Gift scene – Miss Pruitt vs. Viv. Now I need a boathouse picnic. Every time you get to the mountaintop there’s just more mountain. Then you’re supposed to “prune” at the end – if you have any energy left. Trying to read A Literature of Their Own but Showalter too hard on poor old Woolf. Women have always owned literature, it’s the publishers, editors and critics we apparently can’t have. 60,000 words on Gift tells me it’s time to celebrate. No novel could EVER be this hard again. I demand a party. Strange letter from Devon – he is involved with some “Jewish woman” and it isn’t going well. She seemed “inaccessibly foreign” and he is “losing faith” in his “ability to pick a friend.” Is this a plea for help? He specifically asked where I would be this summer. Said he loved me. Took his glamour pic out of the bin where it has lain and put it up, then went out with A and bought a bikini. She and Shoulders are so mired in excuses, lies and expectations no new relationship seems possible. Intensive sunbathing season starts tomorrow. 1PM Thu May 4 -78 Comparing lovers. “It’s Devon in the stretch with Jervaze winded by the wayside”. Finished Gift last week. Letting it “perk”. It feels already “swallowed up” by the past. A read it, disappointed by the ending. Wants murder at the very least. But is that real life? I think I agree with her that it should be. People should kill themselves when you are done with them. Sadly they’re all whimper and no bang. How to fix? When I’m not engaged on some important work my “real life” ceases. Car to its “first service” Mon – involved ferrying each other around and jockeying with one car. Why don’t M & D appreciate this? It’s like they want us to be ashamed of needing each other to survive. Mom staying in NYC with the new baby but then coming here Sat. to inspect our dissolute lives. Uh oh. I won’t have any trouble getting time off but I hate to. Can’t work though when she is here. Living two weeks off one paycheck can be done. But I will feel obligated to battle Mom for the check. Finished Glendinning’s Bowen. A life rich and strange but hardly enviable. I’m being pestered by old “college friend” but I am officially “not home”. She sneaks around the house, sniffing. Sat. 6 May 78 – 1:30 PM Cleaned & waxed kitchen and bathroom floors, sitting with newly creamed hands and cup of coffee in recliner. Muse time. Emerge blinking like a ground hog into a new and spring-like world. A year ago I was a rat in a cage. Critical never to let the “merchants of neurosis” trick me into limiting myself. Tues. 9 May Plush Palace – 9:15 PM Mom spent the last two nights at my place – sleeping in my bed since guest room has no bed. Me on sofa – doesn’t matter since I can’t sleep anyway when she’s around. Up at 7 to make breakfast get Mom to airport for 10 o’clock plane thank God. A. came over with blueberry muffins and gazpacho to discuss the visit. Everything Mom said felt like an attack. (She did give me $100 but I spent – and lost – more than that on her visit.) Avril says the island has been worse for Mom because she’s never confronted with a life that would contradict her narrow-minded theories, so its all, “Why can’t people get smart and live exactly the way I do?” She tries to make her personal tastes “emotional law” – and if you don’t agree with her – or God forbid, want to explore something different you’re “the sick one”. Rough stuff. We took her to our favorite Ellicott City restaurant – she wanted Avril to “explain” Mason and me to “explain” my clothes. She said my clothes trigger “weirdos” following us – it was completely in her imagination! She cries. No one decent will “have” me! I say, what if I don’t want to be “had”? I’d ask her about her life but she isn’t honest – she doesn’t know Dad has already told us that her ideology is untrue. She insists when you find Mr. Right everything’s peachy, but Dad says she was uncomfortable and unwilling about sex at first - didn’t care for it. They had to “work hard”. I said we have more experience of pain than Mom ever had – A says she “refuses to learn.” Creepy. Turns what pain she does have back on others somehow. Can’t wait to resume my privacy and my routine, reading book about Forster (The Cave & The Mountain) in my own bed. I think realizing your mother’s limitations is part of maturity, and I’ve been slow because I’m unwilling to adopt my sister’s methods – “Don’t give her anything – tell her what she wants to hear.” I thought better of her than that but I struck out. Since their definition of success is so narrow, I don’t see how I can ever satisfy them.
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Alysse Aallyn
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