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Edith’s Diary

Home Life Magazine

October 2005 issue

As the days grow shorter and the air carries the crisp bite of autumn, my thoughts turn to cool red apples, amber sunlight and ghosts and goblins with flashlights wandering the narrow country lane of our home in the Virginia hills. Steve has picked a pumpkin from the sunny patch on the hill and is in the kitchen right now sketching out an elaborate jack-o’-lantern using the stencil pattern on page twenty-two. Little Johnny is standing by, watching with fascination. Soon he’ll come in to help me make his pirate costume. That’s right, we’re making it. No more hot plastic masks that smell like glue, no nylon costumes that fall apart halfway through your little one’s candy pilgrimage. Everything you need to make a wonderful and memorable Halloween costume is probably already in your house.

“Mommy!”

“Just a minute.”

For the pirate costume, gather a red bandanna, black sweatpants, long white sweat socks, aluminum foil, a woman’s long-sleeved blouse, some gold craft paint and a plastic shower curtain ring for the pirate’s earring—

“Mommy!”

Kit Macy stopped typing and pushed her laptop back on the ancient Formica kitchen table with exaggerated patience. Then she turned to the four-year-old who was still tugging on her sleeve. “Are you on fire?”

“No—”

“Are you bleeding?”

“No, but—”

She lowered her chin. “Are you supposed to interrupt me when I’m working?”

Johnny pressed his lips together and glanced at the kitchen doorway behind him before saying, “No.”

Big, guilty kid eyes. They got to her every time. Kit smiled and ruffled his hair. “Look, I know you’re hot and bored. Just let me finish and we can go to the pool, okay? Maybe Mr. Finnegan can fix the air conditioner while we’re gone.” It was July, and the mugginess of the New Jersey summer had already hit them full force. The fan Kit had propped in the corner of the small apartment kitchen sputtered ominously, and she glanced at it. “Before that thing dies, too, and we melt.” One more month and she would be closing on her own house. A house with central air-conditioning and a community pool.

Sometimes it was the only thought that kept her going.

Johnny gave a distracted nod. “Okay, but Mommy?”

She sighed. “Yes?”

“Um, Mommy?

“Johnny, what?”

“Steve has something stuck on his nose.”

It took a moment for her to rewind and replay the mental tape. “What is it?”

He squirmed visibly around the question. “He wouldn’t come with me to show you.”

Two nights ago Johnny had smeared peanut butter on Steve’s nose because it was “so funny to watch him try and lick it off.” A quick calculation told Kit that if Steve wasn’t in the kitchen—and he wasn’t— it was likely that he was in the TV room with her new sofa. Her new twelve-hundred-dollar Open Space sofa with the custom vine-patterned upholstery. That and peanut butter would make for an ugly combination. Actually anything and peanut butter made for an ugly combination.

She jumped up. “Where is he?”

“In my room,” Johnny admitted, his voice small behind her as she dashed out of the kitchen.

She rounded the corner to the small, dark hallway and heard repeated sneezes behind Johnny’s closed bedroom door. “You’re not supposed to lock him in there, baby, you know that.”

“I know,” Johnny answered, drawing each syllable out guiltily.

Kit pushed the door open and saw Steve, the black Labrador mutt, lying on the floor, sneezing and growling and trying to wrestle something off his nose.

“Damn.” She dropped to the floor and tried to calm the squirming dog down enough to remove the shower curtain ring she’d gotten out of the bathroom to make an earring for the stupid pirate costume. “Damn, damn, damn.”

“You said a bad thing!”

“You’re right.” She pried the ring open and pulled it off the dog’s nose, trying to resist saying another stream of “bad things.” “You know you’re not supposed to put people things on Steve. I’ve told you that like a hundred times already.”

“That’s not a people thing,” Johnny said, his voice stern with four-year-old condescension. “It’s a bathroom thing.”

“Today it’s a people thing.” Arguing with him was like arguing with a slick Jersey lawyer. He always came up with some loophole she hadn’t previously covered. Last week, in the late-night emergency pediatric clinic, it was that she’d never actually said not to put the wheels from his Matchbox cars into his ears. Now she looked at him pointedly. “But, for the record, keep bathroom things away from Steve, too.” She examined the plastic ring. If it had managed to squeeze that tightly on Steve’s nose, it probably wouldn’t be all that good for a toddler’s ear. Frankly it had struck her as a stupid idea when the woman from the local playgroup had mentioned it in the first place. Now she’d have to come up with an alternative before her deadline.

“What’s it for anyway?” Johnny asked, taking the ring from her and immediately getting it stuck on his fingertip. He barely had time to whip up a good whine before Kit reached over and pulled it off with a snap.

“It’s supposed to be for your costume.”

He looked skeptical. No, afraid. “I don’t like it.”

“Neither does Steve.” Upon hearing his name, the dog pushed his wet nose against her hand and she patted his head.

“I don’t like pirates.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I don’t like boats,” Johnny went on, clearly covering all pirate bases so that she wouldn’t try to convince him to be, say, a superhero pirate. “And I don’t like earrings. I don’t like them at all.”

Sometimes it felt as if he was plucking at her nerves as though they were strings on an out-of-tune ukulele. “Look, buddy, you don’t need to like pirates. You don’t need to wear the costume on Halloween. All you need to do is be a kid long enough for me to make sure these homemade costumes work so I can print them in my column.”

Though he was only four, Johnny had long since understood that all the quirky domestic things his mother worked on were part of her job as “Edith Chamberlain,” Home Life magazine’s monthly “Edith’s Diary” columnist. She’d been the managing editor of the magazine for five years now, but she’d taken over writing the column two and a half years ago when the real Edith Chamberlain—who had established the column forty years ago—had passed away.

“I don’t want to be a princess, either,” Johnny said in a small, husky voice. He’d been saying it ever since she’d taken him to the craft store to get the glitter for the princess costume she was also detailing in her article.

Kit gave the dog one last pat, then stood up. “Yeah, well, you’re just trying the costume on for me, then we’ll take it off really fast, okay?”

His voice went glum. “Okay.”

She looked at her watch. “In fact, we should do it now because your dad’s gonna come pick you up when he gets off work in an hour.”

“You said we could go to the pool!”

“We will. We’ll try the costume on really quick, then we’ll go to the pool and watch for him from there. Deal?”

“Okay.” He was already busy peeling off his sweaty Batman T-shirt and the pull-up diapers her mother kept telling her he was too old for.

“Just put him in regular underpants,” Kit’s mother would say. “If he messes them up, he’ll get uncomfortable in a hurry.”

“He doesn’t seem to have a problem with walking around in a poopie pull-up,” Kit pointed out every time. “How much difference will it make if it’s underpants instead? It would just make more work for me.”

But Kit’s mother was never wrong, even when she was patently incorrect. She just clicked her tongue against her teeth, shook her head knowingly and said, “You coddle that child too much.”

It wasn’t a surprising sentiment from her mother, she realized, considering the fact that Kit had done more to raise her two younger sisters than her working mom had, but it still made her feel bad.

“Got it!” Johnny called in a singsong voice. Kit hadn’t even realized he’d left the room, but he was walking back in with the pale blue princess dunce cap—she made a mental note to find out what the real name for it was before printing the column— perched on his head at a rakish angle. He dragged the satiny dress—made entirely with a tank dress from Target and cheap, shiny polyester fabric ironed on with stitching tape—behind him. The glitter they’d stuck on with glue left a vaguely Disney-like trail behind him.

She had to hand it to him, he really was a good sport.

Kit went to him. “Put your arms up.” He did, and she slid the dress over his head. She had to admit it looked pretty good. Perhaps a little like a trailer-park prom dress, but that was what Halloween was supposed to look like. “How does it feel?” she asked. “Comfortable? Move around a little bit.”

He struck a superhero pose, then ran across the floor and back again, feet stomping hard on the wood floor. Thank goodness it was just the Finnegans living beneath them, since they were both all but deaf. When he got back he nodded his approval. “It’s good.”

“I wonder if it will hold together,” she said, tugging gently at the hem. She was alarmed to see that the stitching tape was starting to pull apart when there was a knock at the door. “Wait there,” she instructed Johnny, pressing the hem together before getting up. “Don’t move.”

He stood still and she admired the costume one more time, hoping she might be able to improvise a quick fix. Maybe a glue gun? She was so distracted by the thought that when she opened the door and saw her ex-husband, it took a moment to compute. Why wasn’t he at work?

“Rick.”

“Daddy!” Johnny cried from across the room.

“Hey, bud.”

Johnny ran to Rick, arms outspread, dress coming apart more with every step. He threw himself into Rick’s arms, distributing pale blue glitter all over Rick’s Grateful Dead T-shirt.

Rick looked at his son. “What’ve you got on?”

Johnny flashed his mother a look of dramatic disapproval. “A princess costume.”

Rick looked over Johnny’s shoulder at Kit. “The column again?”

Kit nodded.

“They really ought to pay you extra for doing that. Put some money aside for therapy.” Rick laughed.

“Very funny. You’re early.”

“I know, I know, but I borrowed a car from my neighbor and I have to get it back to her by six.” Rick was six years younger than Kit, and once upon a time she had been enamored by his long-haired starving-artist persona. Now she was just weary of it.

“What happened to your company car?” she asked, dreading the answer even before the words were out of her mouth. He didn’t lose his job. Please, God, don’t let him say he lost his job.

Rick clicked his tongue against his teeth and let out a long aah breath. “I’m just not a corporate drone.” He set Johnny down. “I gave it a try—and I really appreciate your helping me get me the job and all—but it just wasn’t me.” He was unfazed by the withering look she was giving him. “The good news is, I got a gig painting a mural on the side of that old brick building on Maryland Avenue and Dobrey Street.”

“Does it pay?”

He tipped a flattened hand from side to side. “But the exposure is great. The theme is Indonesian history.” He nodded, as if that would make Kit feel all better about her son’s father’s complete lack of financial prospects.

Kit just looked at him. “Indonesian history.”

“What’s that?” Johnny asked.

“Excellent question, my friend.” Rick ruffled Johnny’s hair. “We’ll look it up this weekend.”

“You have to look it up?” Kit repeated incredulously. “You got this job without even knowing anything about it?”

Rick just smiled and said to Johnny, “Change your clothes—we have to go.”

“Okay. I’ll be right back!”

When Johnny was gone, Rick looked at Kit with pity. “Rough week?”

“What?”

“You look like hell. And you’ve got that past-deadline-temper thing going. You work too much.”

She frowned. “I have to. I’m trying to buy a house for our son. And it will be a lot easier if you keep up your support payments, such as they are.”

He waved her concerns away. “Don’t worry about it.”

It was good advice, because worrying about Rick’s lack of prospects had never made one whit of difference anyway. “So. Got big plans for the weekend? Besides studying Indonesian history, I mean.”

“Thought I might take him into the city to see the Modigliani exhibit at MOMA.”

“That would be good.” Better Rick than Kit, she figured. It wouldn’t hurt Johnny to be exposed to modern art, and God knew Kit didn’t want to do it. Modigliani gave her a headache. She didn’t like taking liberties with proportion. She was more of a Vermeer girl herself.

It wasn’t a bad metaphor for her life with Rick.

“Then again, we might stay in and watch Time Bandits.”

“Again?”

“Hey, it’s a classic.”

She couldn’t help but laugh. She’d known what she was getting into when she’d married him, and now, when he was consistently what she expected, she could hardly call foul on him for it. At least he loved his son and took good care of him when it was his weekend.

Johnny pounded back in the room. The dress was gone and he was in a Batman shirt—inside out—and shorts. He hauled his overstuffed Buzz Lightyear suitcase across the floor noisily. Buzz himself, the beat-up three-pound toy that could double as a weapon in the event of a burglary, was sticking out of the top.

“Ready to go, Buzz?” Rick asked, reminding Kit why she had loved him once. He was really good with Johnny, there was no denying it.

“Yup, he’s ready.” Johnny pointed to the obvious projection from his bag.

Kit knelt by the boy and gave him a tight hug. “You have a good time with Daddy, okay?”

“Okay, Mommy.”

She drew back and touched his nose. “I’ll miss you.”

“I’ll miss you too. ’Bye!”

“’Bye, baby.” She stood up.

“Relax a little,” Rick said to her. “These sixty-hour weeks are too much. You need to just be sometimes, you know?”

And that, she realized all at once, was why she’d married him. That mellowness, that hippie-without-the-drugs peacefulness. That was why she’d married him.

And why the marriage had failed.

Because no matter how much she wanted to be that easygoing, mellow, pass-the-nachos person, she was always going to be the uh-oh woman.

Thank God Johnny had Rick around to balance that out.

“Yes,” she agreed. “I need to be employed.” She smiled. “But don’t worry about me—I’ve got the whole weekend to eat bonbons and listen to Frank Sinatra on the CD player.”

“Give it a try,” Rick said with a smile. “Couldn’t hurt.” He looked down at Johnny. “Let’s go. The car’s about to turn into a pumpkin.” He put his hand lightly on the back of Johnny’s blond head and guided him into the hallway.

For a moment she watched Johnny’s slight body walking away, his pipe-cleaner arm raised to hold his father’s hand, then stepped back into her apartment. The door closed with a light click behind her. She still heard their footsteps—Rick’s heavy plodding and the tap of Johnny’s run—disappear like music at the end of a song. When they were gone and she knew she was safely alone, she smiled. The weekend was hers. She didn’t have to make a single vegetable if she didn’t want to. In fact, she could eat Cap’n Crunch over the sink for two nights in a row if that’s what she wanted.

She had forty-eight hours to unwind the stress that had wound her up all week and she had to start right away.

She got the Cap’n Crunch out.