Soft Body on the Tooth's Graze

Ne In Cielo, Ne In Terra

"I started to ask her what she wanted, but she did not seem the kind who accepts questions. I jumped off the bed and offered her the only chair in the room. She didn't want it. She looked at the chair and then at me, thoughtfully, smiling her disinterestedness in merely sitting down. Then she went around the room reading some stuff I had pasted on the walls. They were some excerpts I had typed from Mencken and from Emerson and Whitman. She sneered at them all. Poof, poof, poof! Making gestures with her fingers, curling her lips. She sat on the bed, pulled off her coat jacket to the elbows, and put her hands on her hips and looked at me with insufferable contempt.

Slowly and dramatically she began to recite:

What should I be but a prophet and a liar,
Whose mother was a leprechuan, whose father was a friar?
Teethed on a crucifix and cradled under water,
What should I be but the fiend's god-daughter?

It was Millay, I recognized it at once, and she went on and on; she knew more Millay than Millay herself, and when she finally finished she lifted her face and looked at me and said, "That's literature! You don't know anything about literature. You're a fool! I had fallen into the spirit of the lines and when she broke off so suddenly to denounce me I was at sea again" (80-81).

IV YOUNG AMERICA: "The days passed; and one of them rang a bell in the soul, of Cornelia Thornwell. She had kept her vow, she had won the wager with herself. For a whole year she had taken care of herself, asking no advice and no favors from any one. She had got a job as a manual worker, and held it for a year, and lived on her earnings, and had twenty-five dollars put away. Now she might go home if she wanted to.

Did she want to? It was hard to be sure; at one time she would find herself thinking about this one and that, and she had happened to them all this time. But then she would remember the desperate determination of everybody to dominate her life; all those highly disciplined and rigid people who knew what she ought to do at every moment of her life, and would never cease from telling her! Well, she would have a way to escape, a city of refuge!

She had made up her mind to tell no one where she had been; it would be a scandal, a mystery with which they might torment themselves for the rest of her life; a skeleton in the family closet--the bones of a runaway grandmother! The imp of mischief kicked up his heels in the depths of Cornelia's soul; she thought of each person she knew, and what that person would make of the problem. The secret would be a club she would hold over their heads, to make them behave. 'Let me alone, or I'll disappear again!'" (81).