2002-10-03 - 2:33 a.m.
Today I looked at my books again, and found one I haven't glanced through in years, The Theater of Tennessee Williams, Volume 1. It has lost some of its poignancy. I own it because it contains both Streetcar and The Glass Menagerie. Opening it today, I found I'd read half of Menagerie standing in front of my bookcase. That play affects me in that special, profound way that happens when a work of literature almost perfectly describes not just your innermost feelings, but the circumstances that are giving rise to them. The major difference is that my family has money, and there are lots of little differences (for one thing, the cramped apartment of the play is different in size from our suburban house (but not in tone!) but the bigger contours are almost identical. My family is that family: my mother, Amanda, my sister, Laura, myself, Tom. In late high school I realized that this would be my sister's and my situation if we didn't get out of the house, which made me very glad for college -- at the end of the play, Tom joins the military.
I talked to my mother yesterday; she had sent me an effluent letter and also needed to fit me into her Christmas plans. So I call, and she outlines the very specific plans she's worked up. It includes, she tells me, for me and her to drive up to my family's home in upstate New York. From Miami. Together. It takes me a few moments to get my mind to understand what she's proposing, and I almost laugh when I realize. The two of us, without even my sister as an intermediary, crammed together continually for 24 hours plus an overnight stay -- that as an opening act to holiday time with the entire big happy mostly-divorced family. "Oh, but why not?!" she whined at me.
I should explain the title of this entry, "how lucky dead people are." In my childhood, I had burned into my brainthe image of my mother cheerfully entering my room each morning to cheerfully wake me and push me to go to school, which I hated with dread. For eight years (until my appendix burst in middle school) I had perfect attendance, and it didn't much decline after that. I think this ritual trauma, in which often her cheerfulness turned to angry earlymorning screaming at my sleeping body, has something to do with the issues I have now regarding waking up for class, even though I am now doing what I want, with her far away. So anyway, from scene three of The Glass Menagerie: Tom: "Look! I'd rather sombody picked up a crowbar and battered out my brains--than go back mornings! I go! Every time you come in yelling that Goddamn "Rise and Shine!" "Rise and Shine!" I say to myself, "How lucky dead people are! But I get up. I go!"
