[February 7.]
IN THIS house where I drag out my accursed, devilish, weary existence, upstairs in the bathroom, on the little ledge at the top of the wainscoting, there are six tooth-brushes: an ordinary white bone-handled one that is my younger brother’s; a white twisted-handled one that is my sister’s; a flat-handled one that is my older brother’s; a celluloid-handled one that is my stepfather’s; a silver-handled one that is mine; and another ordinary one that is my mother’s. The sight of these tooth-brushes day after day, week after week, and always, is one of the most crushingly maddening circumstances in my fool’s life.
Every Friday I wash up the bathroom. Usually I like to do this. I like the feeling of the water squeezing through my fingers, and always it leaves my nails beautifully neat. But the obviousness of those six tooth-brushes signifying me and the five other members of this family and the aimless emptiness of my existence here—Friday after Friday—makes my soul weary and my heart sick.
Never does the pitiable, barren, contemptible, damnable, narrow Nothingness of my life in this house come upon me with so intense a force as when my eyes happen upon those six tooth-brushes.
Among the horrors of the Inquisition, a minute refinement of cruelty was reached when the victim’s head was placed beneath a never-ceasing falling of water, drop by drop.
A convict sentenced to solitary confinement, spending his endless days staring at four blank walls, feels that had he committed every known crime he could not possibly deserve his punishment.
I am not undergoing an Inquisition, nor am I a convict in solitary confinement. But I live in a house with people who affect me mostly through their tooth-brushes—and those I should like, above all things, to gather up and pitch out of the bathroom window—and oh, damn them, damn them!
You who read this, can you understand the depth of bitterness and hatred that is contained in this for me? Perhaps you can a little if you are a woman and have felt yourself alone.
When I look at the six tooth-brushes a fierce, lurid storm of rage and passion comes over me. Two heavy leaden hands lay hold of my life and press, press, press. They strike the sick, sick weariness to my inmost soul.