117 August 30–1:45 p.m. Right about now I should start getting lyrical and extremely elated. I am just that, as a matter-of-fact, but my glorying in physical well-being is tempered by a touch of nostalgia of the “Sweet-Thames-Run-Softly-till-I-End-My-Song” variety. Only this time I will punctuate with my old “Never Again” refrain.
On the last day before the family comes home from their week’s cruise, I sit in careless freedom on my large sunporch outside the guest room. In aqua haltar and blue shorts, wet hair drying, bleaching to streaked blond in the sun, sun tan oil splashed freshly on deepening brown flesh, my poetry books beside me. Ever since they went away, leaving Helen and me with the house and Pinny and Joanne I have felt the intangible steel cord of subservience loosened from my intestines. Never again will I linger in pure gastronomic liberty over a dinner of fresh corn and lambchops, or steak with fresh iced peaches and vanilla icecream for dessert. Never again will I dry myself after an invigorating swim in the blue salt ocean visible from this house on the hill, put on a clean cotton dress over a vivid, electric, cooly tingling body, and bike jauntily to market to buy “anything I want” to eat. Never again will I sit on the porch of this mansion, become so firmly and temporarilymine these past days, hearing the hoarse waves heaving, seeing the blue green water over the lawn, between the great pensive sighing trees. I could play my piano, if I wanted, or read, or sleep, or merely sit here, feet scalded by the burning gray-slatted floor, sun frying willing flesh, writing.
Today I got a post card – adorably and laboriously printed by my favorite Freddie. Pinny and Joey sleep dociley – beautiful lovable, spoiled babies –my children. Complete physical well-being, exalted environment, a sense of capability and self-integrality never before felt. God, for the sun, beating, beating, melting my body to gleaming warm bronze, bronze-thighed, bronze-breasted, ripe and full, glowing. And oh, for the thin copper threads of my hair, incandescent in the sun drenched wind. For the screams and squeals of children and gulls over the continuous splash of the waves. Blue, flashing white, space, heat, salt, bird twitters and chirps in the grieving, sighing trees, and at night, the dark, indigo sky, often the fog, and lights hanging in suspended blurred globes. Even wet laundry flapping in the grass-flavored wind. Even a childs’ freshly-bathed body under my finger tips.
God, how I love it all. And who am I, God-whom-I-don’t-believe-in? God-who-is-my-alter-ego? Suddenly the turn table switches to a higher speed, and in the whizzing that ensues I loose track of my identity. I act and react, and suddenly I wonder “Where is the girl that I was last year?… Two years ago? … What would she think of me now?” And I remember vaguely tolstoi’s argument about fate and inevitability and free will. As an act recedes into the past and becomes imbedded in the network of one’s individuality it seems more and more a product of fate - - inevitable. However, an act in the immediate present seems to be more a product of free will.
Is it not that a particular act becomes inevitable, while obviously so, since completed. Take the Smith business. I still can’t remember just what put the idea of a double college application into my head, but apply I did. And a year ago last May, after having been accepted and even having gotten $850 scholarship from the college, I still didn’t know whether or not I could go – because of complete lack of funds. Teetering then, as I did, I could not imagine myself in coming years – because I could not picture my environment – Wellesley, the old homestea
