I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolley-bus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.
Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight of my own bones.
There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It’s like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction – every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it’s really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour.
I’m not sure why it is, but I love food more than just about anything else.
The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.
I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.
People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep.
You oughtn’t to see this. You’ll never want to have a baby if you do. They oughtn’t let women watch. It’ll be the end of the human race.
I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn’t groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.
I think Buddy could have been a teacher as well, he was always trying to explain things to me and introduce me to new knowledge.
He was always saying how his mother said, What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security, and What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from, until it made me tired.
He was very proud of his perfect health and was always telling me it was psychosomatic when my sinuses blocked up and I couldn’t breathe. I thought this is an odd attitude for a doctor to have and perhaps he should study to be a psychiatrist instead, but of course I never came right out and said so.
I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was 9 years old. After that - in spite of the Girl Scouts and the piano lessons and the water-color lessons and the dancing lessons and the sailing camp, all of which my mother scrimped to give me, and college, with crewing in the mist before breakfast and black-bottom pies and the little new firecrackers of ideas going off every day - I had never really been happy again.
The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way.
I felt like a racehorse in a world without race-tracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig-tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs i would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are? Animals.
There were no people I knew he would want to brag to about it, the way college boys bragged about sleeping with girls in the back of cars to their roommates or their friends on the basketball team.
Now the one thing this article didn’t seem to me to consider was how a girl felt.
I couldn’t stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.
That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the coloured arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.
I tried to imagine what it would be like if Constantin were my husband. It would mean getting up and 7 and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast and coffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he’d left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he’d expect a big dinner, and I’d spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates til I fell into bed, utterly exhausted.
This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A’s, but I knew that’s what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard’s mother did from morning til night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself.
And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs Willard’s kitchen mat.
I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn’t want to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterwards you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.
How would you like to be Mrs Buddy Willard? I had an awful impulse to laugh.
Well, you were right, I am neurotic. I could never settle down in either the country or the city.
If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell.
If you love her, you’ll love somebody else someday.
A feeling of tenderness filled my heart. My heroine would be myself, only in disguise.
I leaned back and read what I had written. It seemed lively enough, and I was quite proud of the bit about the drops of sweat like insects, only I had the dim impressions I’d probably read it somewhere else a long time ago.
I wondered, if I’d been my old self, if I would have liked him. It was impossible to tell.
I would rather have anything wrong with my body than anything wrong with my head.
I knew I should be grateful to Mrs Guinea, only I couldn’t feel a thing. If Mrs Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.
If I was going to fall, I would hang on to my small comforts, at least, as long as I possibly could.
I don’t see what women see in other women, what does a woman see in a woman that she can’t see in a man? Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, tenderness. That shut me up.
What I hate is the thought of being under a man’s thumb. A man doesn’t have a worry in the world, while I’ve got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line.
Would you act differently if you didn’t have to worry about a baby?
How easy having babies seemed to the women around me! Why was I so unmaternal and apart? Why couldn’t I dream of devoting myself to a baby after fat puling baby like Dodo Conway? If I had to wait on a baby all day, I would go mad.
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