Then Again - Diane Keaton [42]
And Finally …
This will be strange because I am going to be honest. By honest, I mean I won’t leave out details like I usually do. I’m sitting in front of the fireplace—a fire is burning; burning one of our dining room chairs. I’m a bit shaky, but I’m not lost, frustrated, erratic, or illogical. The chair has almost burned away. I don’t care. Last night all my framed photos were thrown. There’s splintered glass everywhere. The flowers Diane sent are all over the floor. The table has a big gouge. I have red bruises on my face. There are black and blue marks on my arms and legs. Where in hell are WE HEADING?
I can’t vent like Jack does. This is the key to our mismatch. My anger comes out in cold unbearable behavior. It eats on him until he explodes. I don’t know why I constantly practice challenging Jack. It’s so out of hand. He says the salad at Coco’s is good. I turn quiet, because he didn’t say, “But not as good as yours.” He asks if I trimmed the bush in the garden and I say, “Why do you want to know?” He asks where I’d like to eat, I say, “I don’t know.” He says, “Well, how about Dillmans?” I say, “We always go where you want to go.” He says, “There’s a program on TV that sounds good.” I say, “I read it wasn’t that great.” He says, “What’s for dinner?” I say, “You’ll like it.” He says, “Typical Dorothy answer.” Then I’m mad all evening. I don’t know how many times I’ve told myself that nobody really has my welfare in mind but me. My care is in the hands of ME.
Jack left me a note. “I wish to hell you’d leave me.” I called and told him I wanted to, just as soon as he figured out how to do it. BULL SHIT. I’m angry. I feel totally misunderstood. I know things will never get better. When I think of Jack, something gets ahold of me. I do NOT want to complain. I WILL NOT—but I WANT better. This is my right and, in a funny way, my responsibility. I need stimulation. After a life of working and planning for the family … I need others. My head gets too lost when it’s only me hanging around the house all day, every day. After last night I thought I would kill myself rather than go through the torture of losing my mind.
From Diane
Mom, the brain fed you an overload of negative data, which you held on to for dear life. Why couldn’t you stop beating up yourself or the people around you—i.e., Dad? It must have been hard to take into consideration what it was like for him to come from a money-driven, half-crazy, fatherless home, complete with Mary Alice Hall as Mother. The effect of such an upbringing did not make Dad an easygoing liberal-minded kind of guy. Don’t think I don’t remember his entrances and how they disrupted the mystique we created with a kind of dreaded reality. Dad was the enemy we kept close. It wasn’t just you, it was all of us.
As the recipient of whatever public validation there was to be gleaned from the business of civil engineering in Orange County, Dad was dynamic. You went a different path. You read Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself in a river, and Anne Sexton, who locked herself in a car and turned on the engine. You had a poet’s appreciation of language, a beautiful face, and an irresistibly alluring, almost inhuman amount of charm, but these gifts didn’t sustain you. By the time 1975 rolled around, your best friend—your