Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/293

 parts and read lines the men seem to want, but when women are by themselves they don't act or speak or think that way, or as they are presented in novels. It's as though the men were ventriloquists and the women were puppets. Lucy says a girl has to be what the man wants or he isn't satisfied. I know the past three months of observing Lucy, the girls backstage, Norma and Corinne here, listening to them speak frankly of their affairs, has been an education which has opened my eyes to a clearer understanding of myself as a woman. I recognize now that I've been trying to be like the portraits of women I've encountered in literature. I'd like to write about a woman, Lucy for example, as she sees herself, plus what a man would see. Lucy says, as do the other girls, that men only seem to want the act of lovemaking from women, and so it doesn't matter much to them who it is, and that is why men can go to prostitutes.

She was fourteen when … and I'm almost nineteen and still a virgin this month and year of Our Lord, November, 1924. Oo la la! Is this a crime against nature? Or F. Scott Fitzgerald? I must admit I was shocked when Lucy told me about Clem. I'm freer of inhibitions now. Of course she didn't know I had had a crush on Clem, though it wore off when I knew I was coming to New York. I even had a slight one for a few days on Semy. That's me, easy Vida, the well-known author. Some writer! A writer who doesn't know what to write. Nevertheless.

Nevertheless whenever I think of writing Lucy is on my mind. Is this transference? I love this room. Girls shouldn't live together even when best friends. Poor Mae, that awful ovary operation. Still, as Lucy says, that's one thing her mother won't have to worry about any more. Lucy certainly comes up with the strangest information. She says men don't care what color your hair is when in bed with you! She was furious when I said I was going to have a henna rinse because hazel hair is neither one thing nor another. She dominates me. I want to be a jazz baby too. No, I don't. Only part of the time.

"I said to myself, it can not be—" Of course, Sappho meant death. Takes me a long time to think that word. It's the odor of death I smell when I read Scott Fitzgerald. His flappers seem to be dying as they bloom.

"Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds—" At least Maupassant's people grew up. Not merely neckers and petters.

This coffee smells good. Odor is an essence hard to describe. Hard for me, I mean. If I didn't have to meet Clem I could write and write. About what? I don't know any Scott Fitzgerald people. Main Rh