No, you don't. It's a play now, and you don't have time to change to aqua dress, gold shoes and Reggie's fur coat. You walk down the aisles, among sleek black taffeta dresses, dangling crystal earrings, bare shoulders and high heels - only you have your old black jersey and red skirt on, and you carry his old khaki jacket. Do you shrink inward and want to melt into the plush floor carpet? Ah, no, not at all. You walk down proudly, laughing into all faces, laughter filling all the cracks in your self assurance like plaster. You are happy and proud to have him sit beside you, laugh with you, and hold your hand once. When you are young, what does it matter if you forget and leave your diamond tiara on the bureau back home? When you are old, there will be time enough to worry about that.

  Now I am surely becoming an incurable romantic. But please, hear me out. After the play we walked out, breaking from the crowd that pushed out in knots of people up the aisles, raveling at the exit-signs. Another cold black March night. So I said to myself, unassuming creature that I am, "he-was-being-chivalrous-last-night-because-it-was-traditional-to-kiss-date-after-dance." I steeled myself to a cool goodbye at the head of the stairs. "I have something to show you," he said as we neared the house. He turned our steps across the street to the Chem Lab." There was a road on the hill behind the building, and a fence bordering the road, and a field of grass beyond the fence. I sat on a fence post, looking over the field to the road below and beyond. Lights blinked yellow white, and cars moved and scurried to and fro. I felt what the 19th century romantics must have felt: The extension of the soul into the realm of nature. I felt that my feet were growing into the hill, and that I was a jutting outgrowth of the elements ... a humanized tree stump, or something equally improbable. He stood in back of me, hands on my shoulders, and the wind broke against him as I sat in the shelter of his upright body. Then we walked out to the crest of the field, wading through the grass, arm in arm. "You know," he said, "I was wondering how to be when you came - cool and casual - or friendly ... and you make it so easy." So he put his arms around me and put his cheek against mine, kissing me, then, once. The wind blew my hair back and whipped tears into my eyes as the two of us stood facing each other. Walking back, we talked about ourselves - conversation not to be reproduced - but I remember laughing as he said he had been wary of asking me down and a bit bitter because of my "popularity." When we got to the house I couldn't bear to have him come up stairs and see me in the light - windblown hair and tearful eyes may be delightful on a dark hilltop under the stars - but under a 100° watt Edison bulb in a narrow hallway - God forbid! So we stood outside, and he was softspoken and touched his lips to mine once sweetly as Chuck came out the door. I said good night to the two boys, and went upstairs alone.

  What is more tedious than boy-girl episodes? Nothing; yet there is no tedium that will be recorded so eternally. Eve baited Adam back in the dark ages, but it is the tragedy of man to die and be born again, and with each new birth the cycle begins all over again. Variations on a theme. Yet the other night I felt a preview of myself ten years hence breathe down my neck with a chilly whisper. The two of us were "babysitting" at his house this Friday, and younger brother" had been allowed to stay up till we came. The parents left, and we went upstairs to the bedroom where a small vociferous boy bounced eagerly during the reading of some A. A. Milne poems by older brother. Then the light was turned out, and in the quiet, older b. asked younger b. questions and listened respectfully for answers. Yours truly sat on the bottom of the bed, partly a stranger, wanting to be loved by the little one, touched when he asked her to stay and keep him company. Then it was time to leave him to sleep. The man got up and left. He had no identity, but as his back loomed dark in the light cracking in through the open door, he was the Man who would be the chosen one to father children and I was the Mate, bending last over the bed, whispering a little word into my son's ear as I closed the door. But in the light, downstairs, I was Sylvia and he was himself, and there was the sea between us again. (I said there was a "sea." No, I will chide myself. There was only a cushion, and a tray of icecream and cookies. But it served, it served.)

  After this charming little bouquet of idyllic description I will be earthy and matter-of-fact. I will say that I hated bobby pins and buttons when I was little. I liked the clean quick flash of zippers, but despized the round, fingered little objects on shirts and sweaters. I ran away screaming when a woman bent cooingly over a baby-carriage and crooned "My, what a dear little button-nose your baby has!" I was nauseated at the sight of bobby pins. I would not touch them. Once, on the day I was going home from the hospital after having my tonsils out, a woman in my ward asked me to carry some bobby pins to the lady in the next bed. Revolted, I held out a stiff unwilling hand, flinching as the cold clammy little pins touched my skin. They were cold and shiny, as with grease, and sickeningly suggestive of warmth and disgusting, intimate contact with dirty hair.

  March 29th - Thursday

  Some people have to have silence and peace when they write. I am in a bad position, looking at writing from the point of view of celestial inspiration. My fat fleshy grandmother sits in the corner, breathing loudly, sewing on the coat I will wear tomorrow. The ice box clicks and whirrs. From the downstairs bathroom comes the bristly sound of my brother brushing his teeth. If I were going to be realistic, I would not say much more than "It looks like an add of the middle-middle class home." Yet somehow I don't give a damn about the srcaped place on the yellowed and finger spotted wallpaper. I don't care too much that the rug in the dining room is blueflowered and has the threads showing where the chairs are scraped across it, or that the chair seats, once shining maroon with satin stripe, are now darkened and greasy with food stains. I can almost ignore the room grammy loves so much - with its unbelievable color combination = pale blue wall paper with sprays of pink and white pussy-willows, dusty rose bedspreads, maroon rugs, and an off-blue and pink flowered chair. It's funny, but now I'm home, and no matter how many mansions I will see, I won't care about the shabbiness of this dear little house. For I feel a great equanimity about peoples opinions, now. I don't care any more about the handsome wealthy boys who come gingerly into the living room to take out the girl they thought would look nice in an evening cocktail dress ... I said I wanted to go out with them to meet new people. I ask you, what logic is there in that? What guy you would like, would see the depths in a girl outwardly like all the other physical american queenies? So why go places with guys you can't talk to? You'll never meet a soul that way - - - not the sort you want to meet. Better to stay in your garret reading than to go from one party to another. Face it, kid: unless you can be yourself, you won't stay with anyone for long. You've got to be able to talk. That's tough. But spend your nights learning, so you'll have something to say. Something the "attractive intelligent man" will want to listen to.

  All this preamble (above), and what I really wanted to get down before I head off to New York was more like this:

  An open letter: to you whom it concerns:

  I won't call you darling; that would be cute. And I'm not being cute, not tonight. I wanted to tell you how you are beginning to be the one I can talk to. I have always talked: sometimes to Mary, sometimes to Eddie, sometimes to myself. More often to myself. But suddenly, with the need to take a concrete human being for a confidante, I build my framework of a world around you. I don't write this to you, because it is not time. I may never tell you, and, in years, I may not need to, because you might become part of my life - - - physically and mentally ... and there would be no need to verbalize, because you would understand.

  Perry said today that his mother said "Girls look for infinite security; boys look for a mate. Both look for different things." I am at odds. dislike being a girl, because as such I must come to realize that I cannot be a man. In other words, I must pour my energies through the direction and force of my mate. My only free act is choosing or refusing that mate. And yet, it is as I feared: I am becoming adjusted and accustomed to that idea. And if I could be your companion I would laugh at those previous fears. I like what you heighten in me. And I am amazed that I, so proud and distainful of custom, could consider marriage an honorable and vital estate. But under certain circumstances I do justly consider it that.

  Tonight I went to a hen party. I will tell about that later. I want to talk about getting the bus home, and my walk down from Weston road, and what I talked about to myself on the way to this room, this chair, this instant, (which is gone, even as my pen scratches the first "i.")

  There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone. There is an off-focus light cast by the moon, and the streetlights are part of the spotlight apparatus on a bare stage set up for you to walk through. You get a feeling of being listened to, so you talk aloud, softly, to see how it sounds:

  I am walking down this street and I am being propelled by a force too powerful for me to break because eighteen years of walking down streets had chained me to the inevitable action of going from one place to another and always repeating the circle or line and returning home without stopping or wondering ... my feet move one after the other and I cannot stop them ... they are heading home and I know in my head that I must go home because tomorrow I must get up early to go to New York ... yet in all these blind box houses there is no one to listen to me or hear my feet clicking ... or perhaps behind one of those black gaping bedroom windows someone lies on the edge of oblivion and my footsteps are grinding mechanical anonymous sounds along the edges of sleep ... footsteps without feet or legs or body ... but I have a body ... and I am curled up in its neat and miraculous network of muscles bones and nerves ... I am woven into a snug automatic cocoon of flesh-and-blood ... and I feel only a curious amusement as my feet move me on and as the world slips by and houses never stop but turn a side foreshortening to a front and lapsing to a side always moving as I move ... but I can stop and to prove it I will ... there ... there ... I am standing still and my feet have stopped clicking ... they are waiting docily in their snail like leather houses ... but I could not turn and walk back ... no ... but some night I will break these eighteen years of walking home and walk all night, away from the magnet that pulls and attracts me like a scrap of metal ... and now I am walking again .... but I will take this road instead of mine ... I will assert myself feebly and approach from a less frequented path ... so these houses have shadows strange across their faces, and I could not go up to the door and knock and say: Let me come in and suck your life and sorrow from you as a leech sucks blood; let me gorge myself on your sensations and ideas and dreams; let me crawl inside your guts and your cranium and live like a tapeworm for a while, draining your life substance into myself ... no; the houses have strange leaf shadows on their faces .... they draw their tree leaves like a veil across their faces ... and I walk in the middle of the road ... can shadows clutch you, trip you? ... I think I could be strangled by those shadows ... so I walk and now I am at a corner ... if a man should step from behind that mailbox ... if a man should crawl out of that mailbox ... if that mailbox should shudder, stretch, uncurl and become a man, I should ask him who he was and if he liked walking down streets at night ... and he would be tall and lean because that is the animal dream of our age ... and he would walk all night and all tomorrow with me ... and I would talk and unrust the words and thoughts which stagnate in me from lack of verbal expression ... but there I go ... it is perhaps significant that I transformed the mailbox into a man and not a woman ... I am part man, and I notice women's breasts and thighs with the calculation of a man choosing a mistress ... but that is the artist and the analytical attitude toward the female body ... for I am more a woman; even as I long for full breasts and a beautiful body, so do I abhor the sensuousness which they bring ... I desire the things which will destroy me in the end... I wonder if art divorced from normal and conventional living is as vital as art combined with living: in a word, would marriage sap my creative energy and annihilate my desire for written and pictorial expression which increases with this depth of unsatisfied emotion ... or would I achieve a fuller expression in art as well as in the creation of children? .... Am I strong enough to do both well? ... That is the crux of the matter, and I hope to steel myself for the test... as frightened as I am ... and now the houses are turning still, and there are a few rooms lit where I can see into a square of warm yellow light where people move and revolve in the little boxes which house them.... shell-less crabs... flesh caged in steel shells of cars and planes and trains .... and I would walk and talk aloud to myself all night... but I cannot because my feet have brought me to the door ... the twentieth century is an age of popular fallacies, of scientism and of symbolism... so I pause before the door and I know that of all the houses turning after me as I passed, this house is the one where I was young and where I turned through time ... and this doorstep is the one crowded with the ghosts of boys and all varieties of kisses... and I am surrounded by the friendly fingered familiar places of the brief whirl in color and motion and words and actions ... which has been my life ... so I know instinctively, like the rat in the maze, that this door opens... this of all the doors ... my feet know this is the door... my eyes know... and there is no doubt whether it will be the lady or the tiger" ... because here I snip off the thread of aloneness and enter into the ritual and rooms that are the family, that are the home .... and my umbilical cord never has been cut cleanly... so I press thumb-down-on-latch and step up into light, into tomorrow, into people I know by sight, by sound, by touch, by smell, by flavor .... and the door closes behind me, and I turn the lock with a click that shuts out the disturbing wasteland of sleeping streets and fenceless acres of night ....

  Notes on an experimental film:" scenario by Dali: a shock film: sex and sadism:

  Opening: "Il y a une fois ... " man idly whittles fingernail with razor... goes on porch outside... looks at sky... (switch to sky) ... three thin clouds slice horizontally over a full moon... (girl's face on screen)... moon again ... (girl's face again) ... hand of man lifts eye and slits it neatly with razor ... closeup of gore....

  Next scene: Man bicycling with box around neck .... female drapery .... (switch to woman looking out of window) ... man seen from above... falls to sidewalk ... she rushes down... kisses his motionless face ..... (back to room) ... woman opens box... lays clothes on bed.... man materializes .... looks in curious absorbtion at his own hand.... (closeup of hand) ... a red wound in center of palm and ants scurrying busily in and out...

  Next: Man and woman watch from window.... (down in street) .... sexless female pokes in tender and casual fascination with stick at object on ground .... object is human hand.... police push crowds away .... she clasps hand to her ... puts it in box.... cars speed by as she stands meditatively in street .... (from widow again)... car approaches... crushes her ... man turns from window ... approaches woman with lust.... traps her .... hands reach and caress breasts and hips under print dress .... hands feel breasts and dressed figure becomes nude... then clothed... breasts become buttocks.... and the hands smooth the resilient contours... (strong sense of lust awakened... ) ... woman escapes .... man approaches dragging two grand pianos .. , weighted with deer, cannon balls, priests... (superhuman force of lust?) .... woman escapes through door ... hand reaches after her (closeup of crawling ants in wound ...)

  Next: Woman enters room.... sees moth as speck on curtain .... moth enlarges ... (closeup ... with skull on back)... skull becomes man .... he wipes his mouth.... and it disappears.... she screams and rapidly puts lipstick on her own lips .... hair grows from his lips.... she looks under her arm .... hair is gone .... (sexual symbol of erotic zones?) ... closes door and runs to beach .... picks up handsome man.... laughs & embraces ... down the shore... pick up rags & remnants of box .... kick them away... laugh & go on ...

  -End-

  - And so it seems I must always write you letters here that I can never send. And so I will write to you a few lines that came during class on Monday after your visit, after I said things to you that I should not have said, and so, here it is:

  The slime of all my yesterdays

  Rots in the hollow of my skull:

  And if my stomach would contract

  Because of some explicable phenomenon

  Such as pregnancy or constipation

  I would not remember you

  Or that because of sleep

  Infrequent as a moon of green cheese,

  That because of food

  Nourishing as a violet petal

  That because of these

  And in a few fatal yards of grass,

  In a few lengths of sky and treetops ...

  A future was lost yesterday

  As easily and irretrievably