Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

Kate marched in after school with three girl friends and asked me if I had forgotten the pajama party which I had forgotten completely. At 9 o’clock tonight, four boys from the high school came around with a ladder and tried to climb into the upstairs bedroom window while Kate and her girl friends screamed to high heaven (in delight, naturally). Matthew finally asked them to come in, and we served them cocoa and cookies. I refused to let them dance. The girls were in pajamas and robes, and enough is enough. The boys left at 10:30, and the girls stayed up another hour discussing them. I told Matthew I thought Kate was a little boy-crazy. He said she was only 12 years old. I don’t see what one thing has to do with the other.

I sometimes miss my sister Penny.

APRIL 18

I drank too much last night. Matthew says he remembers a time at Gillian’s apartment when I drank so much I passed out. He says he covered me with his coat. I couldn’t remember.

Last night Brant Collins said I have the prettiest behind in all Talmadge. I told Matthew that Brant put his hand there while he was dancing with me, and Matthew said that was par for the course. I asked Matthew if he put his hand there when he was dancing with other women, and he said, “No, I don’t believe in it.” I asked him why he wasn’t angry now that I’d told him about Brant, and he said we had reached a stage in the development of American culture where it was considered boorish to slug a man for making a refined pass at your wife. I told him Brant’s pass hadn’t been exactly refined, and Matthew said, “So why didn’t you slug him, Amanda?” I wonder why I didn’t. I think I enjoyed it.

I’m sorry I wrote that. Because I didn’t really enjoy it, and I know Brant is a wolf, but anyway I was fascinated by it. I think it was the first time any man in Talmadge made a real pass at me. There’s something forbidding about me, I think. I wish men wouldn’t look at me as if I were so pure. Well, I am, I guess. But it’s one thing to be pure and another for everybody to know it. Oh, damn it, I sometimes wish — I don’t know what I wish.

I’ll bet Gillian would have socked Brant right in the nose.

MAY 10

Tomorrow is my birthday.

I will be 31 years old. I thought 30 was a landmark. But tomorrow I’ll be 31, and now that seems like a landmark. I get the feeling there are so many things to be done. But who wants a novelty shop like May’s? I can’t see any sense to that. After all, Brant makes a good living. Besides, Matthew would never allow it, I know. Well, anyway, tomorrow is my birthday.

I know every gift I’m getting, except Matthew’s. Bobby made me a pot holder in nursery school, and he spent all day yesterday wrapping it, tempted to show it to me, and yet at the same time making a huge production of hiding it from me. Kate bought me a merry widow, black, the sexiest undergarment imaginable. I wonder what kind of person she thinks her mother is. I have half the notion Matthew helped her pick it out when they went shopping together Saturday. But Matthew’s gift is the real question mark. He hasn’t given me the slightest clue, but he’s been walking around like the cat who swallowed the canary. I can tell he’s just bursting with pride over whatever it is he’s done. I can hardly wait. I know it’s absolutely girlish and foolish to get excited over a birthday gift, but Matthew’s spirit is contagious.

Well, I’ll know tomorrow.

MAY 11, 1954

Mink!

MAY 17, 1954

I worked in the garden all morning. The soil is still a little stiff in spots, and I got blisters on my right hand. I wonder if Myra Hess digs in the garden between concerts. Nursery school ends next week. I asked Mrs. Haskell why she can’t keep them until the end of June, but she said this was the way she’s been doing it ever since she organized the school in 1951, and this was the first time anyone complained about it. I told her that down South they’d been doing things a certain way for a long time, too, but that today the Supreme Court voted unanimously to change it. I think she missed the analogy. Thank God Bobby starts at the elementary school this fall!

Spring seems such a long time coming this year.

MAY 18

I suppose, technically, it’s a suite. At least, it seems to be naturally dividing itself into 4 distinct sections, or certainly 3 sections with a bridge passage. I enjoyed working on this second part immensely, maybe the change of tempo accounts for that. I tried to combine funk with prayer meeting here, using a lively call and response that leads back into the major theme again, something like this:

I think it has a spiritual quality. Matthew raised his hands heavenward and began waggling his fingers when I played it tonight, so I guess he got the message. I wish I knew why his attitude infuriates me. It’s as if he thinks I’m simply doing something to occupy time, or to kill time, or to waste time. I think that’s terribly unfair of him. The suite may be nothing — although I do think it has some good things in it — but it’s not a silly novelty shop like May has. So why does Matthew approach it as some sort of game? Like taking a child on his knee and saying, “That’s a good girl. Stay out of trouble.” I’m not doing this to fill the empty hours. I’m doing it because I want to do it, I want to do something . I wish he could understand that. It would make things so much easier.

It’s getting too warm to wear the mink.

JUNE 3

Thursday, and Parsie’s day off. She rushes out of the house at 7 each Thursday, as if she’s afraid we’ll change our minds about letting her go. I spoke to her last Thursday about making sure breakfast was on the table before she left. So today she must have got up at dawn. The orange juice was sitting there when we came down, having already lost whatever vitamin C it contained when she set it out in the wee small hours. I want to fire her, but Matthew insists she’s a good girl, especially with the children. I think Bobby has an ear for music. He sat at the piano yesterday and picked out “Yankee Doodle.” Perhaps I should begin giving him lessons.

I am fooling with a variation on the suite in a minor key. It sounds very Russian, which is perhaps not too good a thing to sound in this day and age. I wonder if the Russian people want war. Why would anyone want war? Matthew says everyone does — men and women alike. He says the invention of an ultimate weapon is the most frustrating thing that’s ever happened to mankind. It prevents them from doing the one thing they really love to do, and that is waging war. He seems so cynical and bitter sometimes, and yet I know he really isn’t. I’m much too dependent on him. I wish I had an original idea of my own. Well, I have the suite.

JUNE 8

I left Bobby with Parsie this morning, and walked over to the university. I don’t know why I went, really. I walked through the campus and looked at the young boys and girls worrying about their final exams. They all seem so innocent. The old dorm looked exactly the same. I stood on the front steps for a while, but I didn’t go in. I walked from the dorm to Ardaecker, passing the three chapels, and the library, and the law buildings, and then standing outside Ardaecker and listening to someone playing the piano inside. I was going to look up some of my old instructors, but I decided against it.

It’s very difficult to go back.

I think we lose ourselves.

I think somehow we lose ourselves, and we go back to old unchanging places, but it’s not as if the memory is one of ourselves in that place, no. It’s a stranger who stands on familiar ground and tries to visualize another person there, a person so long ago she’s unreal. I wish I could really explain what I felt. It is so hard for me to put words on paper. But why did I go back? I think to learn for myself that the person who moved in that university world is not me, Amanda Soames Bridges.