Wed 8 May 68
Starting to feel more happy & confident. It’s a shame I’m so dependent on men but don’t know if it’s fixable. Maybe it’s like a vitamin – got to have it or you get scurvy. My father suggests I skip graduation and go to a Yugoslavian work camp! Five hundred dollars difference he says. Miss Senior Parties? So I only get the bad part of this place? I say No and No. Mon, 13 May 68 Casey not up from study hall yet – or she’s out with Robt Severn her current main squeeze. Toss has been walking me around, buying me quantities of ice cream and taking endless (bad) photos of me he insists are beautiful (his previous subjects were cows, remember. He searched very hard for a “good stump” for me to sit on.) I am prepared to make him my next affair but I now know better than to make the first move. (I seem to have whirled poor Preston’s brain into whipped green jello. He may never recover.) Slowly slowly catchee monkey. Toss is very good looking and he wears the sexiest holey “holy” jeans – makes me feel faint to walk behind him. I admire his mind a lot more than I expected to. But he does expect me to praise the damndest photographs. (All Black & White. Of course.) He says I have a very bad reputation among Plumly boys. Not sexually – but for “putting them down”. I think it’s a struggle for “who’s the boss” and I am damned if I will be “one down” while I am dating. I tell Toss it’s all in their heads. They say they don’t want “commitment” (Anthem is “It Ain’t Me Babe”) but they despise a girl who “flirts”. It was news to Toss that women can be sexually tortured but I can see he is learning to believe it. (He has a thirsty intellect.) He comes from an all-boy family, natch. I told him he’s lucky – men have orgasms all the time (I’ve only had 2 or 3 I know about.) He says but they don’t necessarily feel good which was definitely news to me! (“Expense of spirit in a waste of shame”, I guess. That I HAVEN’T experienced.) I have to worry about me. Does he wish to twine his golden soul with mine? Am I interesting enough? Or more of a “basket case”? First problem is he’s a purist and I don’t believe in purity. (He defends the Boy Scouts.) I guess its righteousness that really annoys me. (He loves Plumly for example and thinks it’s a great school.) He asked me how I know I exist. I said, “I think, therefore I am.” He laughed. My basic philosophy is simple: even if everything is a mistake it’s a glorious mistake. Tues. 14 May 68 Seniors allowed to spend their study hall in the glorious outdoors!! Makes me dreamy. Nice to end this book, close my childhood with Toss Sheffield. Couldn’t do better. I need to set out now to become strong, keep my imagination from getting stale (if I could figure out how to do that.) Using my own short story made for a good audition in Montreal – 1000 times better than Juilliard – and it would be an adorable town to live in. French and all. Still, they’re going to turn me down. Miss Lissome says I don’t want it enough. I shrink from competition – a VERY bad sign they all assure me. Why isn’t life more like a garden? If pushiness commanded, weeds would rule. Depends on the gardener, I suppose – and I reject pruning. It isn’t entirely my fault – Quakers are anti-competition – but it is party my fault. I don’t ever – haven’t ever – WANTED to do the same thing someone else is doing. I mean, why bother? I can see perfectly well how limiting that is from other people’s point of view. Toss has been accepted at Williams and Reed but wants the latter because it’s as faraway from his quarrelling family as he can get. Far away, also, from me. So it does seem our relationship, like a may fly, has a limited lifespan. Bad letter from Genevieve – Merrill told her all about my “indecision.” She thinks I think M & D will support me forever. I definitely DON”T think that. I’m going to Europe and that’s a plan, no matter what anybody says. Dad says he had to pretend I was 20 to get me into this work camp!!! He’s still sorry I’m going to an “Emmaus Community” in Sweden so I won’t be digging a pipeline in Yugoslavia. But who the hell would want to do that? Mom & I dashing off this weekend to Jane Chalfont to buy clothes for senior parties. 10:40 PM – Just learned the most horrible thing! Toss telling everyone I “tried to seduce him!!!” Writing an angry KOB right now. I invited him sailing and that is NOT tantamount to seduction in my universe!!! Telling him sailing invite is REVOKED!!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Alysse Aallyn
Archives
September 2022
Categories |