#norma millay

So on Saturday night Dell led Ficke to the Millays' apartment. The sisters had just hung pale blue curtains on the two  windows that looked out on the street. The head of their bed narrowly fit between the tall windows. They had rolled the pillows up like a long bolster, covering them and the bed with cloth patterened with orange moons and green trees Kathleen had sent them, then tossed on a couple of golden throw pillows. Vincent's trunk, under the window where the radiator wasn't, also covered with the same cloth as the curtains, made a cozy window seat. Then there was space for a bureau and writing table, and not room for much else but the sisters and a few guests and the mice.

The girls were exhilerated. They were living in New York on poetry and dreams, running on adrenaline, fearless as only the young can be. They were dining out in restaurants on the strength of their charm and good looks, eating bar food in Chumley’s and the Hell Hole, and acting in plays for nothing or a tiny percentage of the gate. Norma worked as a seamstress. Vincent earned a few dollars from selling poems and stories to magazines; it would be a while before she got a paycheck from an acting job.

"But look what Mother made for us," Norma said as she lifted out of a trunk three identical porcelain-faced dolls—identical except for their hair. One was dark, and one was blond, and one was fiery red. Norma asked me if I wanted to hold them, and I didn't. They seemed to me spooky, lying in their old muslin clothes, but their hair was real, all right, and richly colored, and dead.

Vincent was free now, while I was the one at home, you see. Looking back at my life, I felt…I might have done something else. Oh, something with my life. I was keeping house, that’s all. But I had nothing. Having no way, no control of yourself, of your life. I was just a girl in a lonely house.