In the mirror, undressing, I look at the rather impish and mobile face that grins back at me, thinking: oh, growing to be a woman, to learn the art of subtle power! As long as men have ideals, as long as they are vulnerable, there is this power to create a dream for them.

  Laughing, crying, I talk to Bobby. He would like me for a mother. I hold his head in my arms, looking down, tenderly, smiling, listening to his wild idealistic ravings, wondering at the miraculous youngness of him as he tells me how beautiful, how intelligent he finds me, how I have changed him, how we will someday live on a ranch or a desert island, and he will want me to write and be happy, and raise a hockey team.

  Oh, God, what woman does not like to be told how wonderful she is, to see adoration naked in a young beautiful boy's eyes, to feel she can be young in her wisdom, in her intuitive feeling for the rightness of the situation. How powerful, how full of love I feel, honestly, for you, dear guy. And how they smiled at us in the Sou'wester - the cynical sweet little woman waitress, - thinking how crazy in love we were, holding hands over a cheeseburger, laughing, intense, serious, taking our empty cups of coffee back in the kitchen for more, and smiling at all the people, not caring what they thought, only us, being young, beautiful, and maybe not too damned.

  Going out, I am warm, bubbling inside like a savory pot of coffee, down the stairs I skip, stretching my arms gladly to the stars. God, I have a long way to go before I am ready to say to one: it is you I will take and give to for the rest of my days. There are so many days, I think, and I have spent six weeks of days among how many men and boys: first of the summer: Lloyd Fisher; Clark Williams (reading Eliot), Ray Wunderlich (philosophical-medical night walk); Phil Brawner (those lovely gay effervescent evenings); Jim McNealy" (the Esplanade and Louisberg Square at midnight); Art Kramer (plays, dinners, tea and pedantry; ) Marvy Cantor (talk and a dance or two); Attila Kassay (dancing, swimming and a premature abortive attempt at a kiss - and a promise of a future); dear Bob Cochran (the M-G, sailing, theater, music circus, visits, readings); Chuck Dudley (motor picnic, long brotherly-sisterly talks.) And Dick, the recurring main theme. Always there, in the bass, or background, always if faintly, and then coming rich and sweet into strong melody again, the resolution of cacophony, and the ingenious weaving of all the rich and strange and exotic and erratic secondary themes into one rich full orchestration.

  "I am a part of all that I have met." To you, all, whether or not you know, having wandered into the tissue of my life, and out again, you have left a momentary part of you which I will work into something. There is nothing but that it will suffer a sea change into something rich and strange. Through me transmuted.

  Oh, I bite, I bite on life like a sharp apple. Playing it like a fish, I am happy. And what is happy? It is a going always on. There is something better to be done than I have done, and spurred by the fair delusion of progress, I will seek to progress, to whip myself on, to more and more - to learning. Always.

  I have a well, deep, clear, and tartly sweet, of living. All the names, already, and the places. And I am nowhere near the ending. I feel, I must make a list, a diagram, a will, a tribute, to all of you who have fed my growing. Mrs. Morrill" ("You will have a happy life") Bob ("Be happy, I know you will, I know I don't have to worry about you"), Sue Slye" ("You'll get the greatest guy, and you'll have the cutest blonde kids"), and Mr. Cantor ("All I can say is the fellow who gets you will be a very fortunate guy" -) Oh, all of you, all of you with your faith in my potential: I love you all, I will give of myself, my joy, for I have so much, so terribly much.

  And if I have learned nothing else, it is to listen and to love: everyone. A humanitarian, faith in man's potential for good. And a compassion for his weaknesses, his so-called original sins. World compounded of dualities, and man the compromising angelic devil.

  In the car we laughed miracles of love and incredulous tenderness. Outside a woman wove down the street, her hair frizzed and bushy, her face ugly with hate, yelling at the man, who was faceless: "No more of your bull shit, why should I listen to your shitty talk ... " I laugh, and say: stop, stop, you fools, or the sky will crumble and the forty-day rains begin, falling relentless from the angry heavens. And your car will not save you, nor your tardy repentance. Hush, hush your vile talk, he is being won from you.

  And the world goes by creaking at the joints. You, dear, think you are in love with me. Yet you are not lost. There will be a million women. I am glad to be the first, tacking the gay standard as high as I can reach. You can match it, go beyond it someday, Bobby.

  Hell, you deserve more than being in the Ladies' Home Journal. If only I could get you in the Atlantic: "The Kid Colossus." I will aim at the highest, too. A plot. Like "Knife-like, Flower-like," only different. To prove what. To begin where, to end where - from what point of view. Oh, I will brood this year to find the form for the content.

  Val said: visualize, emotionalize, afterwards. Beginning writers work from the sense impressions, forget cold realistic organization. First get the cold objective plot scene set. Rigid. Then write the damn thing after lying on the couch and visualizing, whipping it to white heat, to life again, the life of the art, the form, not longer formless without frame of reference.

  The wind continues by and by, and tomorrow there will be packing and tentative fare wells and Bob and Chuck and Dick - and rest and sleep. Packing, going, sad, glad, lonely for past: moving through so much continuous loveliness, proud to face present uprooting and stoic study program. Eager always still for the promising future which, even if twenty years are gone, is not the final word, nor the stiffening of old uncreative age. Always the promise, the hope, the dream, amid whatever poverty, war, disease and adversity - always persists the credulous human vision, of something better than that which is.

  September 4 - 11:30 p.m. Science study program

  The first day of rigor being over, I am torn between a multitude of conflicting emotions and insights. There is the grim pleasure that I managed to complete my page quota. There is the hysteric and persistent fear that I do not understand all I read, that my water-level of comprehension is a good deal lower than it would be if I were taking the course slowly, step by step, under the guidance of a competent instructor.

  There is the urge to procrastinate, to escape from the rigid cage of study routine I have made for myself. It lures my by a multitude of enchanting distractions; it beckons in the form of magazines, gay colorful stories and pictures; it seeks to simulate hunger, calling me to lose myself in the rationalization of continuous and nervous eating; it comes over the telephone, through young male voices, asking me, (unknowingly) to come and do delightful things. Everywhere I turn, distraction beckons. It whispers: "How easy, to give up: excuses, you have good excuses. You were working, you were sick. Take a gut, plan to waste 6 hours per week next year. Forget about Phy. Sci. 193n and enjoy these last three weeks before the busy delightful whirl of college again begins."

  To hell with you, I say. I have begun to work. My skin is broken out from subconscious anxiety and tension, self-induced. Nothing is more difficult than lashing a vagrant mind suddenly into long self-imposed stints of concentration. But I will learn a few things from this mass of material. I will read and ponder over my 70 page quota per day. That should take 10 days, approximately. I will then allow 5 days for writing, meditating and typing. It shouldn't be as hard as I make it seem, once I get accustomed to the discipline I myself invented. A few evenings a week I will allow myself a date, providing I get my quota done in due schedule

  Today would be an absorbing study if I were good at stream-of-consciousness. My mind tried every trick to elude the prosaic task at hand. I got ideas for stories; the burning desire to revise recent poems and send them out flared bright; I suddenly decided in a spurt of clairvoyance that I would of course marry the other brother, and spent a good deal of time reasoning out pros and cons of one vs. the other. I picked up a magazine, hurtled into a story, rushed through, and came up for air feeling slightly sick and very naughty, getting an almost perverse pleasure when I realized 20 precious minutes were gone. The phone rang and I actually fell downstairs in my eagerness to answer it - symbolically running away from my duties - glad for any reasonably valid excuse.

  And so, now, it is almost midnight of the first day, and I have broken my resolution to go to bed early - postponing sleep, and thereby the inevitable waking up in tomorrow. Another device of escape -. It seems that every year I wince and grovel through an obstacle course that looks quite formidable. Remember how tense I was last fall about the driver's license? The Smith Club tea speech? To be sure, I can always sneak out of this, but I won't let myself. It is an absorbing test of will-power - and of the conflicting wills that make up my psyche.

  As for the husband: how cold, how material and objective I am. Also, how hypothetical! The hypothesis being that I could have either if I chose: and I actually believe I could convince either! I began with the youngest: a time of tender idealism, serious conversation. I believe I have kissed him once. Perhaps twice. Strange, when one thinks of all the other boys, infinite experimental kisses, test tube infatuations, crushes, psuedo-loves. All through this physical separation, through the testing and the trying of the others, there has been this peculiar rapport, comradeship, of us two so alike, so similar, but for science-boy and humanities-girl - the introspection, self-examination, biannual deep summarizing conversations, and then the platonic parting. I broke the unspoken pact only once, and he also, when he kissed me slowly, quietly by the old mill in Brewster on a dark, star-blazing night a year ago this September. I accepted his kiss without emotion. It did nothing to me. I felt: "Here there is no worry, no fear of latent sexual fire. It is all a strange platonic passion. Serene, secure, lasting, never to be consumed by itself into ashes."

  This fall, again, he asked me not to be too nice to him, because he would be susceptible. I acquiesed, laughing, telling him I was interested in boys as people, conquests in humanity, not in romance. A week ago we were reading on the double bed, and we fell asleep side-by-side. Drowsily half-wakened, I turned, warm and damp with sleep, and he was lying beside me, his face buried in the pillow, his arms tight around it, his skin a bronze tan, and the red of his hair like strands of copper. Suddenly tender, I thought, (remembering the way his face had been always young and understanding, shy, gentle, idealistic - and intelligent): "This is the one! After all the whirl and excitement and gay passionate flames, this is the one I will choose to come home to! The proverbial boy next door!"

  Why? Why? Because he is a virgin? Because I want terribly to believe in pure idealism? Because I want, as all women do, to be loved devotedly, without fear of jealousy as I grow old, and the young pretty women continue to parade by? Because I believe we are both perfectionists? Because I see suddenly how he has grown, breaking the neat mold I made for him a while back? I would work hard - a home, children, and free lancing. I would work hard to preserve the idealism in him. And what a strange errand that is in today's world!

  Why deny the other? I am taking him for granted. I am becoming patronizing, not seeing all that his keen mind contains. There is a barrier between. I see only the surface, thickened over now, with all the deep, passionate tensions and competative drives flickering ominously below. With him I would compete. Is it because I say subconsciously: "All right, I can't match you in sex experience, even though I would like to. But I'll show you I can beat you in other ways." Would not that horrible sickening jealousy and cynical relativism of last fall fester still in me - no matter how illogical or logical the cause of it? I can only guess. I think I have forgotten those women who sickened me so then. But I am not sure.

  And so it is. I suddenly for no apparent reason think: I will marry the one with the red hair because I can leave the blond one alone better, and will not feel a little sad when there is his wife, the other woman. Whereas, the red-haired one always calls to me, and I am always wanting to be tender to him. Tall, lean, tweedy, I said. Here he is, only the red-hair is unique. And he does not smoke a pipe. Or read poetry. But there is the pleasant certitude of the familiar. And that is the security that is so tempting.

  Will I ever fling myself into the multitudinous perils and uncertainties of life with a passionate Constantine;n a witty and sardonic and tempestuous Attila; a proud, wealthy aristocratic Philip? They enchant, they fascinate: I could carve myself to the new worlds they imply. But is it not the tragedy of man to be the reactionary, the conservative, and to always choose the certainty of daily bread above the light airy inconsistencies of foreign pastries?

  September 20 - early toward young September 21 - ("There are times," the young man told me softly, "when a man wishes a woman were a whore.") A vile dull evening. A horrible movie, both of us disgusted, staying in out of the rain, sleepy, critical. Driving in the roadster jaunty, bored through the Boston streets with the after-movie crowds thronging crosswalks, and the pink, green, blue, yellow neons all lighted blur in the streets, wet, smooth puddled black. Bored, cross, all wrong. Why do I not wear heels ... because I look like such a bobby soxer in flat shoes? I am young, naive, childish, sixteen emotionally. My reactions are too obvious, too excitable easily. I gush over trivia, embroidering problematically on mere cold factual phenomena. I build too much him on a pedestal breathless with admiration ("Oh, really, yes, yes, go on ... ") And I freeze at a touch. Ah, I am also twice fishing for compliments, and I would deny it with vehemence but for the fact that I am caught - subconscious though my line may be, and he is, damn him, too right. All that is wrong, it appears, is "that we have not gotten drunk together." There is a wall. We have inhibitions. And I force him into acting with my absurd overflowing enthusiasms. They are absurd, and I am acting - because I feel peculiar. He is foreign, alien, yet the different cultural and moral backgrounds we draw upon do not seem to matter too badly. Perhaps I am on the defensive, who knows. Overreacting to the situation with a false burst of effusiveness. Because I want to conquer the cosmopolitan alien before I return to the rustic boy-next-door. (Feminine vanity?) Is not my first desperate rush of enthusiasm (remarked upon formerly by Dick) a vestige of my old fear of people running away, leaving me, forcing me to be alone? Is it not a device subconsciously calculated to interest, to hold, to retain my partner, be it male or female? (I remember when Nancy Colson walked me home from Scouts in Winthrop with another girl. They would always run away giggling together when I started to tell them a story. I did not understand. Bewildered, breathless, I would run after them. And then I learned that they had arranged to run away so they wouldn't have to listen to my lengthy, dull rambling.) I will cultivate restraint. I will stop being a loud-mouthed puppy that falls all over people in a frantic effort to attract them. I want desperately to be liked. I have gone through a long period of awkward, self-conscious unpopularity. Although I could be called an extrovert now, there are still recurrent traces of my old inferiority complex. I put new people on a pedestal, worshipping them for their surprising kindness to me, for their benevolent notice. How many silver-plated statues have I erected, only to humanize them as I grew to know their vulnerable frailties - ? (John Hall," Bob Riedeman, Mr. Crockett, Marcia Brown, Constantine, Attila ... The list could go on and on ... Some stay remembered giants because not fully known: Mrs. Koffka, Doctor Booth," Miss Drew," Francesca Raccioppi" ... yet even they have weaknesses, flaws, biases, blind spots.)

  So I will prove to him I am not the shy respectable naive fool he thinks me. We park, and I, drowsing on his shoulder, am very glad to see the dark road and the leaves all around. I am sleepy and feel very sexy in my black velvet dress. So I just stay relaxed not saying anything, and he leans down and kisses me on the mouth for a long lovely while. I do not care, I will stop thinking. He kisses very nicely, and I will enjoy being kissed for what it is. I am growing quite warm and desiring, and his hands are good and strong behind my back, holding me to him, and I like to wait while his mouth kisses my neck, moving down to where my neckline goes deep, and my breasts hurt swollen a little, waiting for his hands to begin, and my hair is falling loose over my bare shoulders, and my mouth is soft and wet and wanting under his. For a long time no one says anything. Then he says: "W ell, what do you know, a woman is being born."

  "Are you surprised?"

  "No." Simply.

  "I didn't think you would be. I guess I am trying to prove something. We haven't gotten drunk."

  "We didn't need to."

  "But you said ... "

  "I know I said. It was a dirty thing to say, wasn't it?"

  Stymied. I want to say: There is a purpose, a future. This is for some goal, some end. But it wasn't. The end was coition, physically. But I wasn't having any of that. I was being pragmatic. I felt like being kissed, petted, made love to. I would take it as far as I wanted to. To hell with him. I am not a tease, nor a whore - he could go home unsatisfied, rape a stranger, I didn't care. He had tried, chivalrously, (knowing a woman would be insulted if he didn't.) He is smart. He knows what he can expect from me. So he can take the consequences of associating with me.

  To him I would perhaps be a dead end. No intercourse, just a halfway deal. But I am not yet the smart woman who can keep her reputation and be a highclass whore on the side. Not yet, anyway. Incredulous, (he wanted to know my address) I listened to him say: I am not just going to sit here and watch you disappear without knowing where to ...