Crab Orchard Review Vol 12 No 1 W/S 2007

Maureen Stanton and spools of thread, and cast-iron shoe forms, and scraps of moldy leather, and videos of classic Hollywood movies (romances with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn). And treasures my six-year-old nephew, Miles, unearthed: a two-foot long potato-shaped pillow with button eyes; a tiny puzzle; and a stretchy, flesh-toned rubber mask with holes for eyes and mouth and nostrils, creepy and featureless like an alien.

Like a beating heart, in the middle of all the junk and trash and broken-down furniture was a diary, a clothbound book with a flower motif—peonies and morning glories and forget-me-nots. The diary belonged to Faith, daughter of Doris, the size-12-pump-wearing woman who was given the house by Mildred McCabe*. I saved the diary from the trash bag. Diaries and journals interest me. I’ve kept diaries throughout my life and am fascinated with others’ diaries: Sylvia Plath, May Sarton, Anne Frank, Anaïs Nin, who recorded her life in 35,000 pages, and Thoreau, who wrote seven drafts of his journal, Walden. I’d come to see the house as an archeological site, a shipwreck almost, as if it had been pitched upon this ledge during a rough storm—especially the way the house listed and sunk in the middle. The diary was a historical document, a captain’s log, which I read in one night like an engrossing novel.

Faith was a decade older than me, a caring, loving daughter: “Called Ma to make sure she got home okay.” I liked her immediately for her thoughtfulness and because she was someone who relished small pleasures, as I do: “Just took a lovely bath.” Is the burn mark on the edge of my tub from Faith’s cigarette? Was she so relaxed in the hot soapy water that she closed her eyes and passed through time, forgot her smoldering cigarette until the smell of burning plastic interrupted her reverie? I see this stain every time I take a bath, my favorite place to read on cold winter evenings, enclosed by the once fashionable, embossed, ochre-yellow tub surround. In the coldest deep of winter, when the temperatures sink to single digits, I take baths nearly every night, reading sometimes for two hours, adding scalding water as the bath cools. Once, when my electric bill seemed exorbitantly high, I thought about taking fewer baths, but then I calculated that the price of a bath was about a dollar, which seemed cheap for a metaphorical return to the womb.

I root for Faith as she details her constant struggles with money.

I struggle too, though my penury is somewhat self-imposed. I am educated and capable of earning a good salary, as I did when I had the 224 ◆ Crab Orchard Review