Sometimes I nursed starfish alive in jam jars of seawater and watched them grow back lost arms. On this day, this awful birthday of otherness, my rival, somebody else, I flung the starfish against a stone. Let it perish.
He didn’t answer but reached over and put his hand at the root of my hair and ran his fingers out slowly to the tip ends like a comb. A little electric shock flared through me and I sat quite still. Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy and peaceful.
I was only purely happy until I was nine years old. I had never really been happy again.
The sickness rolled through me in great waves.
Mentally I have led a vegetable existence this summer.
My virginity weighed like a millstone around my neck.
From this experience also, a faith arises to carry back to a human world of small lusts and deceitful pettiness. A faith, naive and child like perhaps, born as it is from the infinite simplicity of nature. It is a feeling that no matter what the ideas or conduct of others, there is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness, in wind and sunlight, with a fellow human being who believes in the same basic principles.
Hadn’t my own mother told me that as soon as she and my father left Reno on their honeymoon – my father had been married before, so he needed a divorce – my father said to her, ‘Whew, that’s a relief, now we can stop pretending and be ourselves.
Children made me sick.
I sat cross-legged on one of the beds and tried to look devout and impassive like some businessmen I once saw.
It was a relief to be free of the animal, but it seemed to have taken my spirit with it, and everything else it could lay its paws on.
She regarded me as a sort of interesting experiment.
She knew and I knew perfectly well I would get a straight A again in the chemistry course, so what was the point of my taking the exams; why couldn’t I just go to the classes and look on and take it all in and forget about marks or credits? It was a case of honor among honorable people, and the content meant more than the form, and marks were really a bit silly anyway, weren’t they, when you knew you’d always get an A? My.
I thought I would spend the summer reading Finnegans Wake and writing my thesis.
She looked terrible, but very wise. As she left the office, she patted my shoulder with one lilac-gloved hand. “Don’t let the wicked city get you down.
I squinted at the page. The letters grew barbs and rams’ horns. I watched them separate, each from the other, and jiggle up and down in a silly way. Then they associated themselves in fantastic, untranslatable shapes, like Arabic or Chinese.
I wrote what the leaves looked like in autumn when I bicycled out into the hills, and how wonderful it was to live on a campus instead of commuting by bus to a city college and having to live at home, and how all knowledge was opening up before me and perhaps one day I would be able to write great books the way she did.
I’m so jealous I can’t speak. Nineteen years, and I hadn’t been out of New England except for this trip to New York. It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.
I collected men with interesting names. I already knew a Socrates. He was tall and ugly and intellectual and the son of some big Greek movie producer in Hollywood, but also a Catholic, which ruined it for both of us. In addition to Socrates, I knew a White Russian named Attila at the Boston School of Business Administration.
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream... I remembered everything... Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape.
I have such a damned puritanical conscience that it flays me like briars when I feel I’ve done wrong or haven’t demanded enough of myself.