Fri 31 May 68
Attempting to muffle my triumph while sitting in Fr after giving Front of Class rept on Duttilleul. Free at last, thank God I’m free at last! Sheffield puzzles me to put it mildly. Invited him to work with me in the ice cream store but he sent Gary Long who is sweet & dumb & no threat to anyone. Then he shows up at the end to help me close. Tells me all about his father whom he deeply admires. Isn’t father worship a good sign in a boy? Or not? He brought Casper the Grasper’s note about my “professional level” Granny. Best performance he’s seen at the school. Wonder if C realizes this is the same girl he stabbed almost to death with a rose pin years ago? Probably not – he’s totally gaga and at least 100. Sheffield says he talks to all the boys about masturbation. Sun 2 June 68 “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now…” Toss’ eighteenth birthday. I was his gift – he ate my throat and whispered through me hair and studied with the Engineering Marvel that is a pus-op bra (he mispronounces as “brazier.”) Started off in the AM at the lakehouse. White clothed tables, Japanese lanterns, très chichi. T took me into the center of the lake on a canoe ride while I ate my breakfast. When it started to rain he took off his pink shirt. Oh my. Oh to scale the white cliffs of Sheffield… Played tennis, sat together at lunch, collapsed side by side in a barley field. Then climbed to the treehouse in Boy Wood where he told me how beautiful my hands are and complimented my “lioness” hair. We undressed each other. Aaahhh… Roses for some very cold November. He shuddered over my breasts. His sweat is delicious. We licked each other clean of every childhood scrape & pain. I felt like crying from sheer happiness. This was the moment I’ve been looking for. I would have made love with him there & then but the Doberman did not drop the sirloin. Preston a terribly inferior lover compared to T… He knelt at my feet to put on my shoes. Only minutes left to dress for banquet – wore my short short SHORT hot pink chiffon mirrored halter dress, (with matching panties.) T. wore 3-piece suit and looked like turn of the century banking scion. Terrible speeches, badly planned. All on the subject of individual vs. society!!! Hard thing to toast. The dance was VERY good. (Band tremendous.) Wore my Indian bells sundress with matching bikini. Did a lot of sherbet eating and cookie consuming. (Shawn asked to dance once – very sporting I thought.) Casey & Robt both sick in infirmary! Mon 3 June 68 10:45 PM Ah, love. T & I go everywhere together. We’d go to the bathroom together if only it was allowed. Lying in the South Woods…3 mins late for IAM final but did OK. (I wore T’s grass-stained shirt!) Master Clarence gave me a test page, a pencil & a knowing look. T. has kitchen job so no dinner for him… T to Alysse (“kindness of bearer”) “My life’s only poetry these days…” Trying to read Sister Carrie but my own life’s much more interesting… Tues. 4 June 68 T to A: “Kindness of bearer” You are definitely the most amazing person I have ever known. It is as if the birds have bloomed. I am experiencing strange & wonderful flashbacks of your presence. Want to talk to you for hours, any moment is a waste when I am not in your sole presence. Please come to the Grad Party at my house…please. I wish I could just express the wonder you inspire. Love. Yes. Who can study after this? Cram session in Room 3 – I could “feel” him through the walls! Staggered half washed into breakfast – there he was – first time he’s been to breakfast in 6 months! (No saltpetered powdered eggs for HIM!) Then we talked in the French room till 8:20. Master Bob opened the door and shook his finger at us. Sat on the steps in the sun as close as we could get. Told me about an NYU girl he’d smoked hashish with. We danced through the barley like a pair of drunkards. How can I be so lucky? How can we ever leave each other?
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Fri 31 May 68
Attempting to muffle my triumph while sitting in Fr after giving Front of Class rept on Duttilleul. Free at last, thank God I’m free at last! Sheffield puzzles me to put it mildly. Invited him to work with me in the ice cream store but he sent Gary Long who is sweet & dumb & no threat to anyone. Then he shows up at the end to help me close. Tells me all about his father whom he deeply admires. Isn’t father worship a good sign in a boy? Or not? He brought Casper the Grasper’s note about my “professional level” Granny. Best performance he’s seen at the school. Wonder if C realizes this is the same girl he stabbed almost to death with a rose pin years ago? Probably not – he’s totally gaga and at least 100. Sheffield says he talks to all the boys about masturbation. Sun 2 June 68 “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now…” Toss’ eighteenth birthday. I was his gift – he ate my throat and whispered through me hair and studied with the Engineering Marvel that is a pus-op bra (he mispronounces as “brazier.”) Started off in the AM at the lakehouse. White clothed tables, Japanese lanterns, très chichi. T took me into the center of the lake on a canoe ride while I ate my breakfast. When it started to rain he took off his pink shirt. Oh my. Oh to scale the white cliffs of Sheffield… Played tennis, sat together at lunch, collapsed side by side in a barley field. Then climbed to the treehouse in Boy Wood where he told me how beautiful my hands are and complimented my “lioness” hair. We undressed each other. Aaahhh… Roses for some very cold November. He shuddered over my breasts. His sweat is delicious. We licked each other clean of every childhood scrape & pain. I felt like crying from sheer happiness. This was the moment I’ve been looking for. I would have made love with him there & then but the Doberman did not drop the sirloin. Preston a terribly inferior lover compared to T… He knelt at my feet to put on my shoes. Only minutes left to dress for banquet – wore my short short SHORT hot pink chiffon mirrored halter dress, (with matching panties.) T. wore 3-piece suit and looked like turn of the century banking scion. Terrible speeches, badly planned. All on the subject of individual vs. society!!! Hard thing to toast. The dance was VERY good. (Band tremendous.) Wore my Indian bells sundress with matching bikini. Did a lot of sherbet eating and cookie consuming. (Shawn asked to dance once – very sporting I thought.) Casey & Robt both sick in infirmary! Mon 3 June 68 10:45 PM Ah, love. T & I go everywhere together. We’d go to the bathroom together if only it was allowed. Lying in the South Woods…3 mins late for IAM final but did OK. (I wore T’s grass-stained shirt!) Master Clarence gave me a test page, a pencil & a knowing look. T. has kitchen job so no dinner for him… T to Alysse (“kindness of bearer”) “My life’s only poetry these days…” Trying to read Sister Carrie but my own life’s much more interesting… Tues. 4 June 68 T to A: “Kindness of bearer” You are definitely the most amazing person I have ever known. It is as if the birds have bloomed. I am experiencing strange & wonderful flashbacks of your presence. Want to talk to you for hours, any moment is a waste when I am not in your sole presence. Please come to the Grad Party at my house…please. I wish I could just express the wonder you inspire. Love. Yes. Who can study after this? Cram session in Room 3 – I could “feel” him through the walls! Staggered half washed into breakfast – there he was – first time he’s been to breakfast in 6 months! (No saltpetered powdered eggs for HIM!) Then we talked in the French room till 8:20. Master Bob opened the door and shook his finger at us. Sat on the steps in the sun as close as we could get. Told me about an NYU girl he’d smoked hashish with. We danced through the barley like a pair of drunkards. How can I be so lucky? How can we ever leave each other? Tues 21 May 68
Stalk into Fr class five mins late & flip open my diary. Horrible day, horrible school. Endless American Dream rehearsals – seniors are all crazy and n one can remember their lines. Long list of medical demands from the work camp people. Not looking forward to wearing a paper dress while dr calmly frigs me. Wed 22 May 68 Decided to forgive Toss who is very abject. (Simon de Beauvoir just skin deep, alas.) He invited me to the Class Day banquet. Said he visited Dan Devereux at college and heard horror stories about me. Also Dan produced some “marijuana” he was deeply proud of – Toss had to tell him it was Hartz Mountain catnip. Got all my graduation invites out today. Just back from a midnight swim in the lake – now hot bath to wash marsh water out of my hair. Casey trying to figure out how far to go with R. I say all the way – I damn well would. She threw her sleeping bag out the window and off they went. Mon 27 May 68 Good weekend. M bought me matched luggage for Europe (red) a handbag and a traveling iron. She is obviously thrilled to be getting rid of me. Helped Spencer Coxe kill weeds and he gave me a ride back. Late for Vespers to confront a cynically suspicious Miss Wormrest who looked at me as if I was nine months pregnant. I was carrying a huge bag of books and a carton of Tab. Said I was out late with head of the American Civil Liberties Union – unimpeachable source. (They let me go.) Casey says that she & R stopped “just short”. Self control. Toss calls it a “Doberman balancing a piece of sirloin on his nose.” The limbo stick of life is too damn low and I refuse to stoop. Casey asks what I’m writing and I say, “The truth.” She has forbidden me to discuss her with you ANY MORE. “I’m going to write my own diary,” she grumbles. So I tell her to get on with it and stop her bellyaching! If people COULD, they WOULD. NoDoz to keep from sleeping when I ought to be studying. Toss has gorgeous male body, which he sheathes in corduroy & sharp-starched French-cuff shirts. Wears an Eng tweed vest on ALL occasions. He knows the sight of him makes me throb. This is why I must be extra cruel. Tues. 28 May 68 Hideous rain. Sheets & gushers. American Dream an enormous triumph. Got a standing ovation, everyone showers me with praise. I really am the PERFECT OLD LADY, they tell me! I can act after all. Yeah, me & Judith Anderson. Not making me feel ANY better. But what would? What would? Toss naked in the moonlight? Sat with him at dinner – I’m sure that conceited the hell out of him. Doubt he respects me for my mind. My luggage arrives stamped A deF A. (I don’t actually HAVE a middle initial. “Go for broke” is my new saying (bar sinister with gules & lions on a field of sable.) Into city tomorrow to be ripped open on some dr’s table. Mom’s Dr has a very strange drop box in the wall for your underpants! (Avril & I think he wears them on his head while writing up his notes.) He’s bound to compliment me on my capacious Womb as he juggles my ovaries in his hand. (They always do.) Some lucky guy will impregnate me and soon, from the looks of things! Blah, blah blah! And we have TWINS running (positively fleeing) in our family! La de da! 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!! Thurs 12:28 PM 11 Apr 68
Day of for Martin Luther King’s funeral. Watched it on TV. After 200 years looks like the rot is all the way through. Preston came over to invite me to see Paul Butterfield and Jesse Colin Young – too good to resist. Says he has been accepted at Haverford, Columbia & Chicago. Nice to have a future. Ended up wrestling on the floor. He got my shirt off but why do boys find bras such complex engineering problems That’s as far as we went. Watched the Academy Awards – Dustin Hoffman is a darling. (Listening to Tim Buckley. Will not be your Summer Princess or your Midnight Maiden. I will be your Sundown Angel.) Reading Madame Sarah. She was a big failure at the beginning of her career. Some comfort. Read To Bed in the Afternoon to mom – she laughed the whole time. About child molestation and frigidity? I said, it’s not supposed to be a comedy – she said, “But it’s so funny!” A prophet is without honor, etc. etc. Time to shake the sand off my new, elegantly spurred leather boots. Thurs 25 Apr 68 - Plumly Trying to learn a little self-reliance but it seems there’s nothing there. No wonder people take drugs. If there was a confidence pill I’d be seriously tempted. Unfortunately on alcohol I am only silly. Sweet loving letter from Devon who has decided to go into politics. I told him all the women would vote for him! He promised to invite me to Paris when he’s ambassador to France – I said it’s a deal. Lying in the sun reading Citizen Hearst. 9PM- relaxing in the Listening Room (no talking. My new favorite spot.) Handel’s Israel in Egypt. At least the music in this Institution for the Severely Disturbed is good. Catharsis! Feeling extremely good nose to grindstone finishing all my work. Mom coming for Alumni Day – no Dad. She took me to the Cocked Hat to buy Lanz dress for prom. Long and white with thick lace cuffs, very pretty. Senior boys have banded together to “go stag – refusing old fashioned dating enslavement” so I was forced (pride) to import Preston. I’m sure he thinks I’m madly in love with him. I always want people to fall in love with me and when they do I am repulsed. But at least I can be polite. Put aside Sybille Bedford’s Favorite of the Gods. Bland. Generation of messed up women. Now why would I want to read about THAT here in my prison cell??? Writing porn exotique under my current nom de plume Kathryn Klavier-Scott. French Class – 11:l0 AM Tues 30 Apr 68 Finished test in 10 mins. Great letter from Merrill saying underneath my “blaze of emotions is a core of strength.” Reassuring. I love her so much. It’s hard not to worry about how false everything feels. I understand the boys’ fears, I really do, I don’t want to commit to something awful & irrevocable either. Old young, make female we are all at total cross-purposes with each other. Language fails us. Poetry? Art? Try to think of a way. Want to run through an art gallery in a nude leotard trailing a colored scarf. It could be my own work: enormously enlarged letters – fragments of “ransom notes” but you can’t tell where or when to make the “drop” so the precious thing is bound to die. (Saw it in a dream.) But I don’t want to go to Art school!!! (Not that they’d let me in anyway.) Then what? “Center down” as the old Quakers say. Mom & Dad offer me trip to Europe for graduation if I work in a peacenik work project. Sent me a list of possibles. All the obviously, desperate starving places. But Sweden’s also on the list! I want to go to Ireland. (NOT on list.) Reading short stories of Sean O’Faolain. Tues 7 May 68 Frustrated & mixed up. “Only a clear pool gives beautiful reflections”. (Says the Artist from The Cat That Went to Heaven. Fave book from childhood.) Shall I blame my period? I can’t imagine ever enrolling in any other school, EVER or jumping through hoops like these again. Going to Tartuffe with Ed Franko; strictly as friends. (I paid for my own chicken. His French is very weak; I had to tell him “hors de combat” does NOT refer to prostitutes.) Rehearsing every spare moment for The American Dream – I’m Granny. Doing a “voice” – channeling my own Granny. But it’s not fun being someone else so I guess that proves I’m never an actress. Worry even in my sleep. Master Gwill gave me an A for To Bed In the Afternoon and said he will submit it to ProSem. I told him not to bother and sure enough, Toss Sheffield turned it down like a bedspread. Toss over to my table (with apologetic ice cream) to explain why. He wants “vignettes”. (Quelle “Belle Epoque!) He says the audience shouldn’t know how they’re supposed to feel. Much more artistic if they didn’t feel anything. He told me to start my own magazine! But he seem to be considering adopting me. That could lead to something. He’s got the most gorgeous long straight blond hair that makes me shiver. Good body, perfect nose. He has a brain. And he is a hermit. (Fingers crossed.) He says that he loves me and he hates me but refuses to elucidate. He came to sit at my table tonight and brought me ice cream. Need to go to bed so I can worry. “Darkness, darkness, be my pillow…” |
Alysse Aallyn
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