Edith’s Diary by Patricia Highsmith Read Free Book Online Page A

off to sleep. Had a bad night last night. My back – right side this time, usually it’s in the middle.’
    Edith went down with the tray, vowing to herself that she’d get an electric kettle for George’s room so he could make his own odd cups. She could perhaps get one with the Green Stamps she already had. She had been saving stamps for a new steam iron, but an electric kettle was clearly more urgent. She put the tray down a little hard on the kitchen table, and poured what was left of the milk into a pan to heat.
    Her thoughts flew off at angry tangents as she snatched down the Ovaltine jar and reached for a spoon. Since when was George God, even if he had made some rather astute comments on Cliffie? Edith didn’t believe Cliffie was hopeless, but George had implied as much. Why hadn’t George ever married, for instance? What was the matter with
his
make-up? Edith couldn’t imagine a man thirty-five or so not getting married, if he could afford to, because it was so convenient to have a wife, they performed so many services. If George had a wife, he wouldn’t be here now, for instance. George was better looking than the average man, he must have been earning pretty well all his life, so Edith concluded that he was selfish, or had made mistakes in handling women, or was perhaps incapable of love or affection for another person. As she carried the Ovaltine up on yet another tray, a smaller one, she felt miserable, felt she had revealed too much to George. She felt vulnerable to him now, more cut down in his eyes. And yet here he was in
her
house, and it was she who was his servant.
    However, some ten minutes later, she was feeling decidedly better. Marion and Ed Zylstra were coming for Christmas, staying at least three days. Friday, day after tomorrow, Brett was bringing the first copies of the
Bugle
in his car, a homely way of distributing a newspaper, Edith supposed, leaving copies at the grocery store, the hardware, the drugstore – four hundred copies. The first issue was a give-away, though the four-pager was supposed to cost fifteen cents. She had tried hard to strike the right note in the editorial, and had gone over it with Gert Johnson. It was mainly about a bill in Harrisburg about upping school taxes, a big concern in the area at the moment. After some asterisks, the last paragraph ran:
     
    Two refugees from New York, Brett and Edith Howland, send Christmas greetings to new friends and neighbors and all readers of the
Bugle
,
and wish everyone a most Happy Season!
    Edith put some Brahms waltzes (Opus 39) on the record player, and closed the living room door which went into the hall, so the music would not awaken George. She had lit a cigarette, and was relaxing in an armchair. The piano music delighted her, transported her to a world of beauty and brilliance – with a beginning and an end. It was odd to feel for a few seconds at a time – the sensation came and went – completely
like
the music, quite at home with it, familiar with every note, yet to realize that the music was not her home, was not the main part of her life. Sometimes she thought music that she especially liked was a drug for her, magical and unreal, and yet necessary.
    Unreal, and yet for many seconds the inspired waltzes made her love her house more, made her remember that the house and the semi-rural life she had now was after all what she had wanted for years. The interior of the house, walls and doors, were of a creamy color, like the exterior which had been originally more white but was now weathering. The front porch pillars could be called doric, but were certainly not pretentious. And Brett was happy enough with his job. George wasn’t
such
an old bore, after all. He’d given Brett money to buy blue jeans and a sweater for Cliffie for his birthday in November.
    When the first side of the record was finished, the silence began to attack Edith like a live thing, eating away at her brief contentment. This was life, she