Diary by Chuck Palahniuk (classic fiction .txt) 📗

busy, Misty goes to the attic, to the room Grace and Tabbi share. Just for the record, Misty's already packed, and stealing the diary from Grace's room. She's carrying her suitcase down to the car. Misty, she's still dusted with dried wallpaper glue. Paper shreds of pale green stripes and pink roses in her hair.

The book that Grace is always reading, studying, with its red cover and gold script across the front, it's supposed to be the diary of a woman who lived on the island a hundred years ago. The woman in Grace's diary, she was forty-one years old and a failed art student. She'd got pregnant and dropped out of art school to get married on Waytansea Island. She didn't love her new husband as much as she loved his old jewelry and the dream of living in a big stone house.

Here was a ready-made life for her, an instant role to step into. Waytansea Island, with all its tradition and ritual. All of it worked out. The answers for everything.

The woman was happy enough, but even a hundred years ago the island was filling up with wealthy tourists from the city. Pushy, needy strangers with enough money to take over. Just as her family money was running out, her husband shot himself while cleaning a gun.

The woman was sick with migraine headaches, exhausted and throwing up everything she ate. She worked as a maid in the hotel until she tripped on the stairs and became bedridden, one of her legs splinted inside a massive plaster cast. Trapped with nothing to do, she started to paint.

Just like Misty, but not Misty. This imitation Misty.

Then, her ten-year-old son drowns.

After one hundred paintings, her talent and ideas seemed to disappear. Her inspiration dwindles away.

Her handwriting, wide and long, she's what Angel Delaporte would call a giving, caring person.

What you don't learn in art school is how Grace Wilmot will follow you around and write down everything you do. Turn your life into this kind of sick fiction. Here it is. Grace Wilmot is writing a novel patterned after Misty's life. Oh, she's changed a few bits. She gave the woman three kids. Grace made her a maid instead of a dining room server. Oh, it's all very coincidental.

Just for the record, Misty's waiting in line at the ferry, reading this shit in Harrow's old Buick.

The book says how most of the village has moved into the Waytansea Hotel, turning it into a barracks. A refugee camp for island families. The Hylands do everyone's laundry. The Burtons do all the cooking. The Petersens, all the cleaning.

There doesn't look like one original thought in any of it.

Just by reading this shit, Misty's probably going to make it come true. Self-fulfill the prophecy. She'll start living into someone's idea for how her life should go. But sitting here, she can't stop reading.

Within Grace's novel, the woman narrator finds a diary. The diary she finds seems to follow her own life. She reads how her artwork is hung in a huge show. On the night it opens, the hotel is crowded with summer tourists.

Just for the record, dear sweet Peter, if you've recovered from your coma, this might put you right back there. The simple fact is Grace, your mother, is writing about your wife, making her out to be some drunken slut.

This has got to be how Judy Garland felt when she read Valley of the Dolls.

Here in line at the ferry dock, Misty's waiting for a ride to the mainland. Sitting here in the car where Peter almost died, or almost ran off and left her, Misty's sitting here in a hot line of summer people. Her suitcase packed and in the trunk. The white satin dress included.

The same way your suitcase was in the trunk.

That's where the diary ends. The last entry is just before the art show. After that . . . there's nothing.

Just so you don't feel bad about yourself, Misty's leaving your kid the way you were abandoning them both. You're still married to a coward. The same way she was ready to run away when she thought the bronze statue would kill Tabbi—the only person on the island Misty gives a shit for. Not Grace. Not the summer people. There's nobody here Misty needs to save.

Except Tabbi.

August 26

JUST FOR THE RECORD, you're still one chicken-shit piece of work. You're a selfish, half-assed, lazy, spineless piece of crap. Yeah, sure, you were planning to save your wife, but you were also going to dump her. Stupid brain-damaged fuck that you are. Dear sweet stupid you.

But now, Misty knows just how you felt.

Today is your 157th day as a vegetable. And her first.

Today, Misty drives the three hours to see you and sit by your bedside.

Just for the record, Misty asks you, “Is it okay to kill strangers to prop up a way of life just because the people who live it are the people you love?”

Well, thought you loved.

The way people are coming to the island, more and more every summer, you see more litter. The fresh water is in shorter and shorter supply. But of course, you can't cap growth. It's anti-American. Selfish. It's tyrannical. Evil. Every child has the right to a life. Every person has the right to live where they can afford. We're entitled to pursue happiness wherever we can drive to, fly to, sail to, to hunt it down. Too many people rushing to one place, sure, they ruin it—but that's the system of checks and balances, the way the market adjusts itself.

This way, wrecking a place is the only way to save it. You have to make it look horrible to the outside world.

There is no OAFF. There's only people fighting to preserve their world from more people.

Part of Misty hates these people who come here, invaders, infidels, crowding in to wreck her way of life, her daughter's childhood. All these outsiders, trailing their failed marriages and