Frances and Bernard - By Carlene Bauer Page 0,22

there. You have been busy this year, and you do deserve some rest. If you figure out a way to pray without ceasing—by which I mean without starting to wonder what you can fix for dinner—write me.

Yours,

Frances

September 16, 1958

Frances, you crank. I’ll pray for your soul while I’m there. On a rosary.

Affectionately,

Mr. Hair Shirt

October 6, 1958

Bernard—

I hope your writing is going well.

I hope you do not mind me interrupting your solitude with a letter, but I turned my novel in today and wanted to tell someone who would understand that particular achievement. I am thoroughly sick of it, but I’m not sure that the people who now have it will be able to do anything to make it better. Now that the initial surprise and excitement of having a book contract have worn off, fear of the ineptness of my new editor has set in. She has recently used the word irregardless in a letter to my agent.

The henhouse has turned gothic. Some of the sorority girls are now bitter. “You’ll do anything for a steak,” I heard one of them say last week at dinner, “but then that’s not all they want you to eat, the steak.” So there is the suggestion that they are now choking the men down along with the steak; that both delicacies, steak and sex, have become repulsive. Then there is Regina. She is studying to be an actress and is working as a secretary. She’s from Brooklyn. She has three sweaters and three skirts, she told me, which she bought to combine in six different ways. And a good black wool dress, she said, for when she has to go somewhere nice. She offered to loan me the dress once when I mentioned I had to go to a dinner for work, but I’m not keen on treating my closet like a lending library, so I said that I would prefer not to wear something that had a Dewey decimal number sewn into it. She did not laugh. It seems that several girls have gone in on that dress, but Regina paid the most, so it hangs in her closet. One night at dinner she leaned over to me and said: “Do you see that girl?” It was a girl across the room; she was talking and eating, nothing out of the ordinary. “She got in trouble,” Regina said, “for using too many condiments at dinner.” Then she says: “That girl and I moved here at the same time. We used to eat together, but she found those girls”—I looked at those girls, and they did seem a little more shampooed than Regina, who is bohemian manqué, like Marjorie Morningstar, only Italian, Catholic, and with an acoustic guitar—“and then that was the end of that.” Regina kept looking at the girls. I kept eating. “You see the girls here turn,” she said. “You see them fall prey to New York. Their hair is different, the clothes get showier, they’re talking all high class where they used to talk regular, and suddenly they’re not sitting with you at dinner. They’re going out with men.” Abruptly Regina went sour: “You just see them turn.” I decided not to sit with Regina anymore, and now I have the uneasy feeling that she is going to find some other girl to turn to, then locate me in the dining room, point me out, and tell this new girl that I hoard dinner rolls and silverware. Or she may come after me with one of the dull dinner knives, scratched out of its luster by endless runs in the dishwasher, and serrate me to death in my sleep.

Then there is a woman reading her way to Christian Scientism. Her name is Sarah. From Ohio. She is overweight. I’ve gone to visit her room and seen a few family photographs, so I know she was once slender. You can see how she might have been a pretty chorus-girl type—sweetheart face, big eyes, blond Veronica Lake waves, rosebud lips. Her eyes are the eyes of a girl who knows she believes lies but can’t do anything other than believe them. She moved in ten years ago—she wanted to sing in musicals—and she has never left. She never did really sing onstage—“Now I never will, I guess,” she says, referring to her weight—but she helps run the kitchen in return for room and board. If anyone is hoarding dinner rolls, it’s Sarah. She says she thanks the Lord for making this