Edith's Diary

by Patricia Highsmith

  ‘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:

  PUSHERS GET THE PUSH-OFF!

  New York. – The numbers runners and drug-pushers are having it tough in New York these days, especially in Harlem. President McUlp’s ‘New Joy’ program is a great factor, and physical activity – neighborhood clean-ups and refurbishment which is going on like a house afire – is, according to some medical statistics, sweating the drugs out of thousands of adolescents. Once free of it, many are becoming holier-than-thou toward their parents, hammering at them to kick the habit or the alcohol habit, whichever they’ve got, and with some success. Most conclusive proof are the long faces of the few pushers left now, when their offers are met with solemn headshaking from their old customers.

  Trade schools are full, attendance excellent, and the boys are getting real experience by repairing plumbing and masonry in their own houses and those of their neighbors – free, as a civic gesture. A new spirit has seized the nation. Former dole-scroungers are now handing their monthly checks back, causing at least one heart attack, that of a government employé at an office on 125th Street.

  Wouldn’t you like to see headlines and news items like these instead of the sordid bilge you’re reading now? If so, VOTE MCULP! For instance, health. Are you interested? You should be. As soon as McUlp is elected, you’ll begin to see items like this:

  The nation’s physical health is on the upswing. Under McUlp the government is the sole insurer of people’s health, and there’s no fine print in the contract. In fact, there is no contract, you just sign up the way you join the Public Library, as the American people are discovering. Nationwide coverage, not just statewide, and none of that jazz about no coverage, if you live in Pennsylvania, say, and the specialist you need happens to live in New York. We’ve all heard that one before. And we know who’s hand in glove, or cheek by jowl, with these Blue Cross and Green Cross and Ye Olde Doublecross and all the other crosses that the American people have been bearing for decades now. It’s the same organization that put the acupuncture clinic in Manhattan out of business recently on some technicality. And why? Because acupunture was actually curing quite a few people and easing the pain of a lot more, and what was worse, it didn’t cost very much. No anaesthetists’ fees, no blood and guts all over the place, no horrendously expensive ‘aftercare’ in hospital beds. You guessed it – it was the American Medical Association that put an end to the acupuncture clinic. The AMA is livid for another reason these days too: they’ve only 60% of American MD’s signed up as members in their money-grubbing outfit which wishes everyone the worst health. The other 40%, mainly young doctors, won’t join. America is coming to its senses. Tax-payers, via the laundering by all these Crosses, are not going to continue paying double and triple for their medical care, just because so-called insurance pads their bills.

  And McUlp is our leader, our man, our President!

  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’?

  29

  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 oth
er 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:

  A cat’s name should be ‘You’, because that is the word a cat hears the most, if people talk to cats at all.

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

  Why not plant dahlias by dropping them like bombs?

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

  Happy news today that Debbie is enceinte once more. She said she cabled C. in Kuwait. She telephoned me. Sounds so happy about it. We both hope it’s a boy this time…

  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.

  From all I can gather, Edith, I think a consultation – or two – would do you good, would relieve your mind of strain (this is always true, when you spill out your problems to another person), and maybe Dr Stetler could see you once a week for a month or so. I know nothing of his methods, except that he is flexible, not someone who’s going to sew you up with promises to see him thrice weekly if you don’t want to. Quite apart from the $10,000 (which you don’t seem to want) I shall be happy to pay for this professional look at you…

  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 somet
hing 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.