Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/292

 "Go away, pigeon, have you no manners, sir or madame, to do that on my window sill?"

It wasn't much of a discovery, but at least a thought unrelated to Lucy and thus symptomatic of release to think of ideas about writing that bubbled like yeast in the sweetness of new freedom. As much as I love Lucy it is impossible to clear one's mind of her observations when with her or alone in her apartment. What Lucy observed, thought, did, always had exclusive reference to herself. When they talked for hours about other people it was Lucy's point of view that was the most original, and it had a submerging effect of making you feel a lack of individuality.

But Lucy isn't self-centered. It's not her fault I have no individuality. Besides, how can you talk about abstract painting to someone who only thinks of the figures in paintings as living people she likes or dislikes and sometimes for the craziest reasons? But crazy reasons which make sense when looked at with Lucy's eyes.

Lucy's black ensemble brought me luck when I mentioned to Norma of the chorus that I was looking for a room. Norma had said, "Why don't you take Janine's room? She left all her furniture when she married her playboy last week. The rent's cheap. Corinne and I have the two front rooms, and we all share the kitchenette, bathroom, and telephone off the hall." Fate shook this room out of her sleeve for me, she thought, noting pleasurably and through a slot between the buildings a cornice of the Morgan Library.

Chinese write with a brush. That's too clumsy and slow, even for abstract writing. Books are superior to painting because—because. Because they tell more. Perhaps I have no imagination. I had to write about a sleighride party I was at. I couldn't invent anything. How do authors know about the inside of people? The outside is difficult enough to describe. I didn't write what I intended about the sleighride party. About Lucy's feeling about boys. A man would have written as I did except he'd have told what the boys felt too. I can t do that yet. I'd like to write about women as they are and actually feel. You mostly get a portrait of a woman as a female in terms of what men seem to want women to be and to feel, what men seem to want to see. I agree part of that portrait is true, but it's only a partial portrait in which women are acting as men want them to act but, as Lucy says, don't know why. I know, since men began making passes at me, and then being with Lucy and the girls backstage, and now sharing this floor with Norma and Corinne, that women see themselves, each other, differently than men see them. Women play 280