Edith’s Diary (28 page)

Time for a snatch of television news while the macaroni and cheese (frozen) got its crust in the oven. Nixon was considering a trip to China, first president to make such a visit, etc. etc. and Edith’s blood boiled with a wrath that she realized was irrational. Nixon was cracked. Anything to escape facing the people, to avoid answering questions that the people and the journalists asked. Even Gert had said that.

‘Switch it off, Cliffie, it makes me sick. Dinner’s ready.’

Edith took her head of Cliffie to a shop in Philadelphia that did casting. Bronze was out of the question because of cost, but there was a new material, a kind of plaster which could be lightened with sandpaper on surfaces such as the tip of a nose, the bulges of a forehead, and the result resembled bronze. The librarian at the Brunswick Corner library had told Edith about the shop, for which Edith was grateful. The job was going to take about three weeks, as the shop had other orders, and would cost around fifty dollars. Edith was pleased. Now the head could have
a place
in the house, a finished work like a picture, not simply remain in sticky Plasticine up in her workroom. ‘City’ Edith was proud of, with its fleck-like, action-filled daubs which represented people in the tiny ‘rooms,’ running, walking, peering out, or sleeping, brooding, collapsing. Casting this would be a horror and probably impossible, however. Edith embarked on another short story, this time straight fiction without a political slant. Her thought of speaking to Gert about telephoning Brett had vanished, which was probably all to the good. Gert called up at least twice a week on
Bugle
matters, but Edith never mentioned Brett. One morning Gert rang up to tell her their paper supplier was closing shop, retiring, and there was a choice of two other companies, both more expensive.

‘Well, everything’s getting more expensive,’ Edith remarked patiently.

‘I’m nearby. Can I pop over?’

‘By all means!’

Edith was at her typewriter when Gert arrived, but she left it willingly and went downstairs. It was a little after 10. Gert wore lavender slacks, a purple sleeveless blouse bulging with bosom, as her slacks bulged, at the thighs, with flesh also. Gert was a bit knock-kneed.

‘Whew! Sorta muggy today,’ Gert said.

They discussed the newsprint problem, and decided, as Edith had supposed they would, to take the lower bidder between the two suppliers. The
Bugle
now had a circulation of five thousand. Lots of families sent it to their kids as far away as Australia.

In a silence, Edith said, ‘I heard you phoned Brett not so long ago. He came to see me.’

‘Oh, yeah. I did. Told him about your short stories – and your sculpting.’

‘Do you know his friend Starr? Peter Starr?’ Edith was mainly curious about him.

‘No.’

‘Well, what did you tell Brett?’

‘What do you mean?’

Edith took a breath. ‘I had the feeling he was worried about me. Somehow. And I wondered why.’

‘No-o,’ Gert said, smiling. ‘I think I told him about some success you’d had selling a story to the underground press.’

Edith took a cigarette.

‘I thought that story was fun,’ Gert went on in a merry tone that Edith sensed was phony.

‘Who is this Peter Starr? A psychiatrist?’

‘I don’t know him. Never heard of him.’

That was very likely true. ‘I really had the feeling Brett and the other man were casing me. I wondered why. Then he mentioned that you’d phoned him.’

Gert looked briefly embarrassed, but perhaps was only pretending embarrassment. ‘Well, yes, Edie. Matter of fact, I was worried about you, and I didn’t think it would hurt – Brett knowing you so well – for him to come and see you. What’s the harm in that? I don’t think he sees you enough, considering you’re both on good terms.’

Edith thought again of cautious Peter Starr. She had heard of a husband somewhere bringing a psychiatrist to the house suddenly, and the wife had been whisked away to a loony-bin, kidnapped more or less. ‘Besides the underground press, which has the virtue of being amusing at least —’

Gert gazed into space, or at the bar cart. ‘You used to be pretty far-out too, Gert,’ Edith went on in a calm tone, because she wanted to learn what she could from Gert, ‘yet you called me – doctrinaire or reactionary one night at your house! Potential right-winger or some such. I don’t know about that. But I do believe that authoritarianism is coming because it has to. It’s an historical – or anyway an objective fact, nothing to do with me personally. Society is becoming increasingly complex.’

‘That’s not the same as believing
in
it. Or preaching it – authoritarianism. You want to organize things, Edie, in your own way!’

‘Nonsense! How could I? – One can go on believing in what one wants to believe in forever, I suppose. Isn’t it more intelligent – even more interesting to see what’s coming and – be braced?’

‘Braced for fascism? Authoritarianism? – Nixon, that creep, for instance?’

‘Why was he elected in the first place? Advertising, television. Do you expect brains, judgement from people who watch the crap on TV? Everybody in the United States watching on average four hours a day?’

Gert groaned as if she were bored, as if what she, Gert, was talking about – hope, maybe, could it be? – was something concrete and worth fighting for.

‘It’s galloping right-wing fascism or authoritarianism right now with Nixon,’ Edith said, ‘and not even the right kind, and if I write for the underground press, it’s only like saying, why in hell not have some fun out of the situation? Why’re you being so serious about it? I mean – what good are you doing, just saying Nixon ought to be kicked out? At least I make a mockery of Nixon’s filthy methods of eliminating opponents who – who still —’

Gert rolled from side to side on the sofa, and Edith thought of Mother Earth, swinging in its course, summer, winter, tipping its axis. ‘Edie, I’m worried about you,’ Gert said.

Edith was – if she was frank with herself – a little worried about herself also, mentally, psychically, and yet, what was wrong? Her health was fine, the house was certainly not a shambles, she and Cliffie were making it financially, and she was holding a job, plus doing several hours a week of
Bugle
work. ‘Well, tell me more,’ Edith said finally.

‘You’ve been through so much in the last three or four years – Brett, George’s death, Melanie’s death, Cliffie drinking too much, let’s face it,’ Gert said in a lower tone with a glance at Edith, though Cliffie’s transistor was on at nearly full blast, playing something that sounded like ‘Ring around the Rosie.’ Gert went on, ‘But believe me, I think you’re doing
well
.’

Edith was impatient. It sounded like a word of comfort for the dying. ‘To get down to brass tacks, did you tell Brett I needed a psychiatrist or something like that?’

‘Well, yes, I did,’ Gert said with her flat Pennsylvania accent. ‘No harm in it, Edie. I really am worried and so is Norm. Just a little guidance sometimes – talking things over with someone —’

‘This one didn’t want to talk. Or he hasn’t rung me back in the last – what is it?’

‘You wouldn’t object to seeing someone, would you? The way people have physical check-ups, that’s all,’ Gert said with a roly-poly shrug.

‘No. But he might’ve come here in his true colors. Maybe they’re both drawing up papers now, coming to get me in a strait-jacket?’ Edith smiled at her old friend Gert, feeling that Gert was not such a good friend, was not and never had been as straightforward as Edith had always given her credit for being.

‘It’s not like that at all, Edie. You know, if you could talk with a psychiatrist about your worries, discouragements and so forth – all those things could get straightened out. Brett said he’d pay for it, by the way. So if you’re willing – It wouldn’t have to be this fellow you met the —’

‘I hope not. He didn’t look outstandingly bright to begin with. A G.C.B. Cliffie called him, Grand Crashing Bore. Looked like a Nixon-voter. Well —’ Edith tried to be cheerful, in the manner of someone who had just been told he had leukaemia, cancer or some such. ‘I’m willing, I suppose.’

Gert seemed heartened. ‘Dreams also – if you can remember them.’

Edith made no comment. Out of twelve dreams, she might remember one. They were weird rather than frightening, she thought, and half the time comical. Gert declined coffee, but agreed to a short rye. All they had been talking about seemed so unimportant compared to Nixon’s save-my-skin tactics now, the fact that a powerful country had no leadership now. Nixon was promising a total pull-out from Viet Nam, announced figures proudly – ‘Another five hundred home this week!’ – because the country was full of people like the Johnsons who wanted their sons home, of course, but Nixon made no comment on the philosophy or strategy of being in Viet Nam in the first place or of pulling out now. Now that he was scared about his office, he was going to China to fill the TV screens with pictures of himself on the Great Wall, no doubt, and using chopsticks. Shades of George Orwell and
1984
.
Distract the public from the real issues!

‘Am I to wait for Brett to send a psychiatrist?’ Edith asked as Gert was leaving. ‘Or go to one myself? You seem to know more than I do.’

‘Oh, Edie!
I
dunno. If you don’t like this guy he brought —’ Gert shrugged again, and seemed glad to take off.

A few minutes later, Edith sat at her typewriter, inspired to launch into her story of the current presidential campaign. As a working title, she headed her piece:
The World as You Would Like
It
, or Why Didn’t We Elect McUlp?

The piece merely touched on the Republican Party’s tactics, the selling of Nixon to the American public (he still appeared odious to Edith on television, despite his new smile and makeup), and the elimination of the strongest contenders, Muskie and Humphrey, by character assassination, thus leaving the Democratic field to McGovern, the weakest candidate. That was all fact, for the American people to observe, if they would. But she let the fantasy go. McGovern was going to be defeated by a landslide, Edith felt dismally sure, but she was going to vote for him rather than for Nixon, and of course she could persuade Cliffie also. BLACKS CLEAN UP HARLEM STREETS was one of her impossible headlines under the idyllic administration of McUlp, followed by an account of the new sparkling windows and tidy streets in Harlem, a report of McUlp’s ‘New Joy’ program, and the spontaneous movement to start spelling Harlem with two a’s to remind people of the pristine Dutch village after which it had been named. Smiling, Edith reread:

Edith, at the end of the article, had McUlp borne out of a building (his headquarters, already burglarized by the FBI or CIA or some such, though Edith suspected Nixon’s personal attention in this) by little men-in-white, because the establishment would never stand for such talk, any more than it would ever allow to be elected a president who believed in stopping tax loopholes and making low-income families exempt entirely from income tax.

And what was Gert going to say? ‘Too strong’?

Rather strangely, there was no word from Brett in regard to a psychiatrist for the rest of the summer and even over Christmas. Only his one-hundred-dollar checks arrived monthly, accompanied by a friendly, boring little note. Gert, in their telephone conversations about
Bugle
work, sounded as she had in the old days, no coolness, no extra warmth either, thank goodness.
Rolling Stone
bought ‘Shoot-the-President’ after a delay caused by
Shove It
’s
folding, and another underground paper having lost her manuscript, but Edith typed in triplicate, and sent in January a copy to
Rolling Stone
.
The payment was not much, but it picked up Edith’s spirits.

The head of Cliffie had been cast in the new material that resembled metal, and it weighed over twenty pounds. Edith had imagined putting it in the living room on its square oak base (for which she had paid twelve dollars), but she couldn’t decide on a place in the living room, and thought it might look pretentious, somehow, and that it might embarrass Cliffie, so the head remained in her upstairs workroom.

In late January, Mrs Elinor Hutchinson, owner and manager of the Thatchery, told Edith in an informal and most gentle way that she could not keep Edith on. This was over midafternoon coffee in the little back room which had a gas burner and fridge.

‘We’re just a bit overstaffed,’ said Elinor, peering at Edith through her slightly thick glasses, ‘so I thought among the bunch of us, I’d keep the younger girls on. I don’t think it’ll be a catastrophe for
you
.’
And she smiled, almost laughed.

Two things struck Edith, they were not overstaffed, and the two younger girls were goons. ‘All right, I understand.’

‘Of course work on the rest of the month if you like, even half of February,’ Mrs Hutchinson continued, still eyeing Edith as sharply, Edith thought, as she sometimes surveyed the store for shoplifters, of whom there were plenty among the weekend tourists. ‘It’s customary to give anyone a month’s notice, so you can consider it that. No hurry at all, Edith. You’ve been a good salesperson from the very start.’

Women’s Lib, that salesperson. ‘I rather like the shop,’ Edith said with a genuine smile. ‘There are worse in this town.’

Elinor laughed as if Edith had said something witty.

Edith wondered, as she worked on that day, if she had slipped in efficiency without knowing it, if she was too old to look presentable, to look like what shopowners wanted as a salesperson, or if Elinor had read two or three of her editorials in the
Bugle
and didn’t care for them? Certainly Edith did not reproach herself for bad manners with the customers, because the other salesgirls or salespersons marveled at her patience with the dawdlers, the people who wanted to see more and more things and never bought anything, or who changed their minds when they were half out of the shop with something. All this Edith had found interesting or amusing in the human nature department. The loss of the job meant around three hundred dollars a month less, and she was going to feel it, to put it mildly.

She told Cliffie that evening. Cliffie was in for dinner, more pink-eyed than usual, Edith thought. It had been a rainy, cold and disagreeable day, and Cliffie had loafed about imbibing, Edith was sure.

‘That Hatchery!’ Cliffie said, picking up his pork chop to get the last bits off the bone. ‘There’re other shops in this – tourist town. Why’s she getting so hoity-toity?’ he asked, letting his voice crack.

‘She’s not a bit hoity-toity,’ Edith said. ‘There’s a recession, you know. People spending less. Maybe she can do with one less, now that the Christmas rush is over.’ Edith thought that Elinor might have told her before Christmas, but of course at Christmas they had all worked overtime cheerfully, and Elinor had given bonuses, twenty dollars each. ‘The point is, Cliffie, it’s three hundred dollars less every month. I’m going to try for something else. But you could too, you know.’

Cliffie looked up from his plate, dark eyes a little wistful, scared. ‘Me?’

‘Make the Chop House take you on full-time – longer hours, anyway. Something. Really, Cliffie. You’re twenty-seven, prime of life, and what’s the matter with a full-time job?’

‘Doing what?’ Cliffie demanded, as if to say for God’s sake, what the hell’s my family or society trained me for?

‘You’ve got a —’ She paused.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. No, nothing,’ Edith said, waving a hand. She had been about to say a wife and child. Lots of luck! Edith smiled, then laughed suddenly. She looked at Cliffie, who simply looked puzzled. ‘
Nothing!
’

Edith felt disturbed. It was like a small whirlpool, she thought, small but in the core. She tidied the kitchen, expressed no interest in the television programs which Cliffie proposed to watch that evening, and went up to her workroom. There were things to attend to,
Bugle
work, the short story she was working on, half written, and the other half should come in one sitting, when she found the mood. She opened her diary. Seven days ago, she saw from the date, she had written something she had completely forgotten, and she read it with a sense of pleasure:

She turned over some preceding pages, looking for a small item that might pick her up, and found:

Edith opened her Esterbrook pen, dated the white page just below the cat entry, and wrote:

Edith went on for another twenty minutes or so, filling the page with her brisk, smallish script. The loss of her job – the fact of having been
fired
– crossed
her mind. But good Lord, she wasn’t going to write anything as sordid and depressing as that! When she had finished her entry about Cliffie’s family (the new baby due next August), Edith swept her workroom floor with a straw broom which she kept in a corner. She shook the plastic sheet out, got up all the clay bits she could, brushed them up in the scoop and dumped them in her wastebasket.

Nelson watched her calmly from his old pillow on the upholstered bench, the same spot that Mildew had always favored.

‘
You
,’
Edith said. ‘Would you like a name like You?’

Nelson made no comment.

Edith thought she must very soon take Melanie’s head to be cast like Cliffie’s.
That
would be nice. Two quite nice works of art, if she did say so herself. Her two favorite people. Well, Melanie was a favorite, certainly. Cliffie – at least his head was good, the head
she
had made. Yes. That was a happy idea. Except for the expense of it. Without a job now, she would have to do some figuring, see where she stood exactly. She didn’t care to think about finances that evening.

Edith received a letter from Brett, dated early January, suggesting in rather stilted language that she might see a psychiatrist in Philadelphia whose name and address Brett wrote. Dr Herman L. Stetler, famous for blah-blah-blah. A real nice guy seemed to be the idea Brett wanted to convey. Edith was surprised by the date of the letter, looked again at the envelope, and saw that Brett had made a mistake and written New Brunswick first, which was a town in New Jersey.

The letter ended wishing her well and so forth. Brett must think it odd that she hadn’t replied. Edith didn’t feel like going to a psychiatrist. Was this the usual resistance of someone already in need of one, she wondered. And how about that person called Starr (was that his real name?) who Gert had said was a psychiatrist? Edith was certainly not going to mention to Brett that she had learned Starr was a psychiatrist. Hadn’t Gert said that? Even though Gert professed never to have heard of him?

It was a few weeks later, when Edith had stopped working at the Thatchery, that she wrote a note to Brett at midnight. Edith had first, that evening, finished what she wanted to do – complete wiping and rearranging of kitchen cupboards and shelves, the kind of task she did better at night when time ceased to matter. Now it was mid-February, and tomorrow was St Valentine’s Day, she realized.

She wrote Brett that she could not understand his preoccupation with psychoanalysis in regard to herself, and she explained that the delay in her reply was due to the fact that his letter had been sent first to New Brunswick. She wrote that she had lost her job but was trying to find another, as it was financially necessary. This was true, both facts, and Edith had considered omitting the job loss out of pride, then reflected that she preferred to be honest. ‘Did your Mr Starr make such a bad report on me?’ she asked in a final paragraph. ‘With Allende murdered, thanks to CIA pressures and usual USA skulduggery, it seems absurd that you should concern yourself with one single woman – myself – in a small town in Pennsylvania.’ When she read her letter over, and recalled the Starr evening, recalled Brett’s accusation of Cliffie as administrator of the overdose to the Old Vegetable, Edith could not refrain from adding: ‘Are you really trying to help me here – and Cliffie? Or are you persecuting us?’ The Watergate disgrace was also making her blood boil, the fact that honest men with honest questions couldn’t get
at
Nixon even for the answers, but that was so blatant now, so everywhere in the papers, it seemed unnecessary to mention that to a newspaperman as being of greater importance than herself.

Edith thought of selling some of her strawberries and raspberries that summer. Of course it wasn’t summer as yet, a long way from it, but she set out her strawberry plants in neat rows in her garden, and they looked so promising! The Cracker Barrel (where once in a while, Saturdays and at holiday times, Cliffie did deliveries either on foot or in his Volks) might well buy a few boxes. Other people in town sold their produce, Edith knew – apples, cherries, raspberries. She could use the money, she and Cliffie. The Japanese shop in town (not run by Japanese but it sold Japanese goods) had not been able to take Edith on as saleswoman or salesperson: they had enough staff, they said. At least they had been pleasant about it. Not so the Sweater Shop, a new shop for women only. The woman proprietor had said in a rather crisp way, ‘Well, this is a surprise. I thought you were a journalist.’ Of course it could have been meant as friendly, and so Edith had chosen to take it, and had replied, smiling, ‘Sometimes journalists can use some extra cash.’ Had the woman said something about
Rolling Stone
?
Edith had forgotten. Not many people in town knew of
Rolling Stone
,
Edith supposed, and still fewer would care for it – it was not only far-out but porno as well. By the end of March, Edith had the feeling she was being boycotted. She had not wanted to feel that. But four shops had turned her down. In view of her good record at the Thatchery (if anyone cared to ask about it), she saw no reason why she should have been turned down. Younger salesgirls were always dropping out, getting married or what not. Some shop would have taken her on, unless something was wrong.

These thoughts hardened Edith against what she thought of as the community. It was annoying. To make it worse, Cliffie was in a similar boat, though for different reasons. He had a shaky reputation. People knew he was slightly oiled all the time, and probably thought it was a miracle he was still allowed to drive his Volks when he delivered groceries or went back and forth from the Chop House where he worked as waiter or barman. Cliffie was the Town Clown, plied with drink by people whose groceries he delivered, especially around holiday time, but every weekend was holiday time for a lot of Brunswick Corner people who kept apartments in Manhattan, and for the gay crowd that poured drinks with generous hands. ‘They kept me in the kitchen and we were all telling
jokes
!’
Cliffie would explain at 8 p.m. or so, when he came home in no condition to work at the Chop House, where he had been due at 7:30, so this meant a telephone call from him or her to the Chop House with some invented excuse. It was a wonder they still kept him on even part-time, but then he was the Town Clown, even popular, Edith suspected.

No reply came from Brett to her letter asking him to make himself clearer about psychiatrists for herself. Perhaps he had changed his mind, thought her strong enough to stand on her own feet? She hoped he thought that. She sold twelve boxes of beautiful strawberries to the Cracker Barrel, fifteen of raspberries, and repeated the performance (or her plants did) later in the season. The store provided her with the proper little wooden boxes. Old Glenn, the owner, was friendly and generous – even broadminded in putting up with Cliffie.

Gert on the other hand seemed to grow even cooler, didn’t come round even during the rather awful week when Edith had to have her lower front teeth – all four of them – extracted because of progressive loosening, so she had felt hardly presentable to most people. The local dentist, Dr Payne (risible name to everyone), was insufferably slow with the permanent bridge, but Edith thought it wiser to go to him than to someone in Philadelphia, which would have taken more than two hours round trip.

The Watergate investigation dragged on, grew boring as Nixon meant it to do, but Edith followed it with an interest that did not flag. Nixon protested that the investigators were endangering national security secrets. He was like a tired jackal being harassed by – what? Dogs, maybe. But the dogs had got his scent. Edith reached a point of pitying even Nixon’s lawyer. Then in August came Nixon’s resignation, and a great sigh of relief across the nation. Not jubilation, as Nixon probably thought, just relief from tension and an insupportable sense of injustice.