Life With Objects

It is small and leather-bound, green, but without guise, bearing the title, “Diary”. The brass lock is broken but whether through time or by someone else’s hand or my own, I don’t know.

December 25, 1964

Dear Diary,
We had a wonderful Christmas and I got most of the things I wanted. I wish I could have gotten a bookbag though. Everyone is playing with the new tape recorder I got. It’s Fabulous! Bye now.

January 2

Dear Diary,
I have to get going on my homework if I don’t want to get a big fat O from our bi-, oops, teacher. I guess Miss Trafton is ok but she gives us so much homework. By the way, I have to think of a new name for you. I can’t just call you Diary.

January 3

Dear Diary,
I just thought of a name for you. I am going to call you Kitty. Because you are so helpful, I am going to give you a heart. Here it is. Oh. I forgot to introduce myself. I have brown hair, blue eyes and I weigh 72 ½. My name is Martha and I have a dog, a cat and a hamster. I have a sister and one brother. I am a girl of course. I like animals and Reed Brewster.

January 5

(Omit from here to April 2)

April 2

(1965) Dear Kitty, (blank)

1967! 2 years ago I was 12 and now I am 14.

Dear Kitty, 2 more years have past and now I am 16. I have changed schools and I have changed myself – 5’4”, straighter hair, bluer eyes, 113 lbs. My boy preferations (sic) have changed too.

As always,

Martha 1969

April 4

LS and I broke up today – very tragic.

April 11

I got my permit! Very exciting!

April 13

1st day of driving. I’m superb.

April 15

I’m sick.

June 23 (1967)

Dear Kitty,
I have shamefully neglected you for 2 years. I don’t know what happened! A lot of things have taken place since I was in the 6th grade. A lot of things. George Lowry is a thing of the past and I am very changed. My eyes are bluer, I weigh 105 lbs now and my hair is straighter and lighter. I have liked many boys. Among them are Mark Newton whom I despise, Peter Lahey, Gary Greenshields, Bob Sandow, Charlie Watson, John and Doug Hunt and two others I have never set eyes on – Steve Besch and Kurt Russell, a movie star. (I have his picture.)

I am really sorry for forgetting you.

Yours,

Martha

p.s. I’m 14

August 30, 2010

To whom it may concern,
My eyes are less blue now and the brown in my hair is mostly not my own. Nevermind how much I weigh. But know this: I have figured out a lot of things since I was in the sixth grade. A lot of things.

She starts, like most girls do, on the first day of the new year. Her best friend Elizabeth gives it to her for Christmas. A lime green book waiting to be filled with a twelve-year-old’s angst, with a lock and tiny key to keep her secrets safe. Gold-trimmed pristine pages ready to be marked by the purple pen Katie always uses.

I try to tell her about my own diary, but she thinks a mother, especially a mother like me, knows nothing about what’s important. She can’t believe I once was her age, and sometimes neither can I.

Two weeks into the summer I lived with my grandmother, Nana said, “Don’t know why you spend all your time writing in that book. It ain’t normal.” That night, I wrote in my diary, I hate Nana. I wish she would die like my dad so I wouldn’t have to live with her. Then, as summer slipped into fall and then winter and my mother still hadn’t come for me, I wrote, I hate my mother. If she loved me she would have taken me away from this horrible place by now. By the end of the year I’d stopped writing. My mother had disappeared, and I had nothing more to say.

Katie hides her diary under her mattress, and I pretend that I don’t know. But I wonder what’s inside, and being the obsessive type, I can’t stop thinking about it, the pages filled with purple words flashing across the screen in my head until I think I’ll go crazier than I already am.

I’m sure that what she says about me is not pretty. She’s told me over and over that she’s sick of living with a nutcase who has to lock the front door twenty times before leaving the house. She says she hates me, and wants to live with her father. But since her father is not interested, she’s stuck with her crazy mother.

Years ago, when my grandmother was in her final days, she confessed to me that she’d once read my diary. “It liked to killed me, the things you said. There’s some things it’s better you don’t know.”

Katie finally convinces her father to let her visit for a weekend. The diary under the mattress won’t leave me alone. I walk past Katie’s room exactly fifty times, telling myself that once I’ve done that, the diary will stop calling to me. But it doesn’t. I go into her room and sit on the bed, right over the damned thing, feeling the pain and anger radiating through twelve inches of mattress.

The book is locked, but she’s left the key where I know it will be – in the jewelry box her father gave her the year before he walked out. Opening my daughter’s diary to the first page, I pause. I wonder if Nana was surprised by what she found in my diary. I wonder if there’s anything Katie can say that will surprise me.