Sun 9:30 AM 28 Aug 77
Mom washing windows. God I think I am supposed to offer help but I Refuse. I need to get the hell out of here. Mom says I can’t add my laundry to hers but have to go to the laundromat in town. So the Battle is On. I’ll just go around smelling bad so there. Mom and Dad are sailing down the Inland Waterway but not till Oct. Have a horrible feeling I’m not out of the woods on this Ryder thing. Maybe I can get established in Wash without him knowing. If I go back to him I will despise myself. Keep D as my lucky talisman. 9;45 PM Drunk, fat and exhausted. Parents had cocktail party inviting Island Poet. (Published in The New Yorker.) Tried to give her the rundown on my summer but it sounds a complete waste – “Wrote half of a no good book, got my other book rejected”. Of course my summer doesn’t sound like anything with the sex & love left out!!! Am I trapped at the end of a cul de sac? No; there is something there. I just can’t find it yet. Dad said he’s sure my life provides a lot of stories, but maybe what I need is a PhD in Eng Lit! Mom’s reaction to that is rigid disapproval. (He’ll never make that mistake again.) To explore the boundaries of one’s soul is Selfish. One Lives to Serve (or to Claim one is Serving. So if you’re too stupid to know you’re selfish its win-win for the small-minded!) Tried to read The Clocks but its Agatha Christie’s worst. Absolutely meaningless. Poor VW going through a very bad, painful period. Obviously sick, recording only weather & food. Now theorists act like she was “mental” not liking to look at herself but Vita Sackville-West felt the same way. Couldn’t look in a mirror, wouldn’t buy evening dresses or go to parties! (And she was on the sexual prowl, unlike poor VW.) I think their era was actually worse about beauty than we are – they gave it a “magic” “classical” quality so it was very much restricted. We see more beauty – and in weird places. Otherwise how explain Leslie Caron? Jeanne Moreau? Charlotte Rampling? Hardly classic beauties but wonderfully, rightfully worshipped as goddesses. I see hope for all of us. 8:00 AM Mon 29 Aug 77 It’s real Agatha Christie weather – fog so dense you can’t see the water. Nevertheless the ferry’s running – Mom took Dad down. I’m feeling successful, sober and sane. I’m doing exactly what I want and will find my own way. I’m determined to be happy and not develop some kind of “rejection phobia.” Not knock out the props of my own happiness. Accept the fact that my pride has been hardest hit. 4:20 PM Letter from the Folger Shakespeare Library inviting me to read Oct 13! Even Mom was impressed. 20 mins pays $50! I’ve hit the big time! Wish I’d known this when Island Poet was asking me why I don’t just kill myself and get it over with. M & D can’t argue with me going back to DC now (Berthe Slaughter’s condo is for sale on the cutest little road. Right on the waterfront. I say I would rather have the art gallery next to the Atlantic Grocery $5000, no bath or kitchen. In case they’re buyin’. They aren’t, in spite of the fact that they are very flush with money right now. Got their $$ back from NY State but Dad always in a panic that we’ll figure out how rich he is.) 9:00 PM Called Shoulders. He said dogs will be all right for a couple of days but he’s being evicted at the end of Sept! Too bad, such a nice house. (And in Chevy Chase!) So I’m spared kennel fees for 2 days at least. R must be back at work (if he still has a job). Reading old NY Times Book Reviews in front of a roaring fire. Dishwashing break – I said I’d do them. Pick up Agatha Christie afterwards – the preferred reading of “shock cases”. (She was a shock case herself. Absent in the Spring is very fine). Island 10 PM Monday night, 5 Sept 77 In bed in the Barnacle drinking coffee, eating bread with honey. Delicious solitude. Can’t go to the Main House because Genevieve’s friends from Boston are there – they no sooner arrived for this Fantasy vacation than they decided they need a divorce. Fortunately they are quiet about it. The one thing they can’t deal with is their dog – tomorrow I have to drive him to the ferry. Oh well. I’ve been enraptured by this delicious solitude – beachcombing is very healing. I guess I am just a solitary sort – don’t really care for people at all, I fear. Last night a bad dream about Ryder – treating me cruelly and me, paralyzed. In the daytime – in my conscious mode – I remember everything good about him, his lips mouth and fingers – his constant air of playfulness. The way we fit perfectly together like interlocking puzzle pieces made it nice that he was short – my mirror opposite, only male. My lost twin. But nature abhors a balance, apparently. Must remind myself how he had to try to turn it to his advantage, throwing the whole system off and spinning my world into frozen space. Now he doesn’t know where I am (although he might suspect.) No phone in this building thank God. Tomorrow goodbye Maine – back to DC to house-hunt. M & D have been good about not dragging me to things – enjoyed the Smythes sculpture show – parties not so much. Parties seem like “consensus building events” where I’m fated to be perennially on the outs. Ford Madox Ford made some kind of statement about how people have to achieve a level of “ordinariness” to be “successful” – I can’t remember the exact quote. Plus I lack the patience to look it up. R felt I despised him intellectually, which of course, I did. I don’t think of myself as stratified, but he is and when you’re with a stratified person, you become so. Sometimes I am in mourning for the part of me that died. I wish I could get my letters back – but they were only loveletters. Must seem now like the ravings of an insane person. Well, there’s no reason to see him again. I think the casual relationship is beyond me. I hope in the future I’ll be careful of men going mach one across the sexual barrier. I’ve got to stop looking at sex as a vitamin requiring periodic intravenous doses.
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Alysse Aallyn
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