by Joan Didion
The photographs were taken by one of her West Hartford cousins, Tony Dunne, who had arrived on leave from Williams to spend a few months in Malibu. He had been in Malibu only a day or two when she began to lose her first baby tooth. She had noticed the tooth loosening, she had wiggled the tooth, the tooth loosened further. I tried to remember how this situation had been handled in my own childhood. My most coherent memory involved my mother tying a piece of thread around the loose tooth, attaching the thread to a doorknob, and slamming the door. I tried this. The tooth stayed fixed in place. She cried. I grabbed the car keys and screamed for Tony: tying the thread to the doorknob had so exhausted my aptitude for improvisational caretaking that my sole remaining thought was to get her to the emergency room at UCLA Medical Center, thirty-some miles into town. Tony, who grew up with three siblings and many cousins, tried without success to convince me that UCLA Medical Center might be overkill. “Just let me try just this one thing first,” he said finally, and pulled the tooth.
The next time a tooth got loose she pulled it herself. I had lost my authority.
Was I the problem? Was I always the problem?
In the note Tony included when he sent the photographs a few months ago he said that each image represented something he had seen in her. In some she is melancholy, large eyes staring directly into the lens. In others she is bold, daring the camera. She covers her mouth with her hand. She obscures her eyes with a polka-dotted cotton sun hat. She marches through the wash at the edge of the sea. She bites her lip as she swings from an oleander branch.
A few of these photographs are familiar to me.
A copy of one of them, one in which she is wearing the cashmere turtleneck sweater I bought her in London, is framed on my desk in New York.
There is also on my desk in New York a framed photograph she herself took one Christmas on Barbados: the rocks outside the rented house, the shallow sea, the wash of surf. I remember the Christmas she took that picture. We had arrived on Barbados at night. She had gone immediately to bed and I had sat outside listening to a radio and trying to locate a line I believed to be from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques but was never able to find: “The tropics are not exotic, they are merely out of date.” At some point after she went to sleep news had come on the radio: since our arrival on Barbados the United States had invaded Panama. When the first light came I had woken her with this necessary, or so it seemed to me, information. She had covered her face with the sheet, clearly indicating no interest in pursuing the topic. I had nonetheless pressed it. I knew “exactly yesterday” we were going to invade Panama last night, she had said. I asked how she had known “exactly yesterday” we were going to invade Panama last night. Because all the SIPA photographers were stopping by the office yesterday, she said, picking up credentials for the Panama invasion. SIPA was the photo agency for which she then worked. She had again burrowed beneath the sheet. I did not ask why she had not thought the invasion of Panama worth a mention on the five-hour flight down. “For Mom and Dad,” the inscription on the photograph reads. “Try to imagine the seductive sea if you can, love XX, Q.”
She had known exactly yesterday we were going to invade Panama last night.
The tropics were not exotic, they were merely out of date.
Try to imagine the seductive sea if you can.
Even in those Malibu photographs which are unfamiliar, I recognize certain elements: the improvised end table by a chair in the living room, one of my mother’s “Craftsman” dinner knives on the table we identified as “Aunt Kate’s,” the straightbacked wooden Hitchcock chairs my mother-in-law had painted black-and-gold to send to us from Connecticut.
The oleander branch on which she swings is familiar, the curve of the beach on which she kicks through the wash is familiar.
The clothes of course are familiar.
I had for a while seen them every day, washed them, hung them to blow in the wind on the clotheslines outside my office window.
I wrote two books watching her clothes blow on those lines.
Brush your teeth, brush your hair, shush I’m working.
So read the list of “Mom’s Sayings” that she posted one day in the garage, an artifact of the “club” she had started with a child who lived down the beach.
What remained until now unfamiliar, what I recognize in the photographs but failed to see at the time they were taken, are the startling depths and shallows of her expressions, the quicksilver changes of mood.
How could I have missed what was so clearly there to be seen?
Did I not read the poem she brought home that year from the school on the steep hill? The school to which she wore the plaid uniform jumper and carried the blue lunchbox? The school to which John watched her walk every morning and thought it was as beautiful as anything he had ever seen?
“The World,” this poem is called, and I recognize her careful printing, quixotically executed on a narrow strip of construction paper fourteen inches long but only two inches wide. I see that careful printing every day: the strip of construction paper is now framed on a wall behind my kitchen in New York, along with a few other mementos of the period: a copy of Karl Shapiro’s “California Winter,” torn from The New Yorker; a copy of Pablo Neruda’s “A Certain Weariness,” typed by me on one of the several dozen Royal manuals my father had bought (along with a few mess halls, a fire tower, and the regulation khaki Ford jeep on which I learned to drive) at a government auction; a postcard from Bogotá, sent by John and me to Quintana in Malibu; a photograph showing the coffee table in the beach house living room after dinner, the candles burning down and the silver baby cups filled with santolina; a mimeographed notice from the Topanga–Las Virgenes Fire District instructing residents of the district what to do “when the fire comes.”
Do note: not “if the fire comes.”
When the fire comes.
No one at the Topanga–Las Virgenes Fire District was talking about what most people see when they hear the words “brush fire,” a few traces of smoke and an occasional lick of flame: at the Topanga–Las Virgenes Fire District they were talking about fires that burned on twenty-mile fronts and spotted ahead twelve-foot flames as they moved.
This was not forgiving territory: consider finding the driveway.
Also consider “The World” itself, its eccentric strip of construction paper and careful printing obscuring one side of the mimeographed notice from the Topanga–Las Virgenes Fire District. Since the choices made by the careful printer may or may not have meaning, I give you the text of “The World” with her spacing, her single misspelling:
THE
WORLD
The world
Has nothing
But morning
And night
It has no
Day or lunch
So this world
Is poor and desertid.
This is some
Kind of an
Island with
Only three
Houses on it
In these
Families are
2,1,2, people
In each house
So 2,1,2 make
Only 5 people
On this
Island.
In point of fact the beach on which we lived, our personal “some Kind of an Island,” did have “Only three Houses on it,” or, more correctly, it had only three houses that were occupied year-round. One of these three houses was owned by Dick Moore, a cinematographer who, when he was not on a location, lived there with his two daughters, Marina and Tita. It was Tita Moore who started the club with Quintana that entailed posting “Mom’s Sayings” in our garage. Tita and Quintana also had an entrepreneurial enterprise, “the soap factory,” the business mission of which was to melt down and reshape all remaining bars of the gardenia-scented I. Magnin soap I used to order by the box and sell the result to passers-by on the beach. Since both ends of this beach were submerged by the tide, no more than two or three passers-by
would actually materialize during the soap factory’s operating hours, enabling me to buy back my own I. Magnin soap, reconfigured from pristine ivory ovals into gray blobs. I have no memory of the other “Families” in these houses, but in our own I would have said that there were not “2, 1, 2, people” but “3 people.”
Possibly Quintana saw our personal “some Kind of an Island” differently.
Possibly she had reason to.
Brush your teeth, brush your hair, shush I’m working.
Once when we were living in the beach house we came home to find that she had placed a call to what was known familiarly on our stretch of the coast as “Camarillo.” Camarillo was at that time a state psychiatric facility twenty-some miles north of us in Ventura County, the hospital in which Charlie Parker once detoxed and then memorialized in “Relaxin’ at Camarillo,” the institution sometimes said to have provided inspiration to the Eagles for “Hotel California.”
She had called Camarillo, she advised us, to find out what she needed to do if she was going crazy.
She was five years old.
On another occasion we came home to the beach house and found that she had placed a call to Twentieth Century–Fox.
She had called Twentieth Century–Fox, she explained, to find out what she needed to do to be a star.
Again, she was five years old, maybe six.
Tita Moore is dead now, she died before Quintana did.
Dick Moore is dead now too, he died last year.
Marina called me recently.
I do not remember what Marina and I talked about but I know we did not talk about the club with “Mom’s Sayings” in the garage and I know we did not talk about the soap factory and I know we did not talk about how the ends of the beach got submerged by the tide.
I say this because I do not believe that either Marina or I could have managed such a conversation.
Relax, said the night man—
We are programmed to receive—
You can check out any time you like—
But you can never leave—
So goes the lyric to “Hotel California.”
Depths and shallows, quicksilver changes.
She was already a person. I could never afford to see that.
6
What about the “Craftsman” dinner knife of my mother’s?
The “Craftsman” dinner knife on Aunt Kate’s table, the one I recognize in the photographs? Was it the same “Craftsman” dinner knife that dropped through the redwood slats of the deck into the iceplant on the slope? The same “Craftsman” dinner knife that stayed lost in the iceplant until the blade was pitted and the handle scratched? The knife we found only when we were correcting the drainage on the slope in order to pass the geological inspection required to sell the house and move to Brentwood Park? The knife I saved to pass on to her, a memento of the beach, of her grandmother, of her childhood?
I still have the knife.
Still pitted, still scratched.
I also still have the baby tooth her cousin Tony pulled, saved in a satin-lined jeweler’s box, along with the baby teeth she herself eventually pulled and three loose pearls.
The baby teeth were to have been hers as well.
7
In fact I no longer value this kind of memento.
I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.
There was a period, a long period, dating from my childhood until quite recently, when I thought I did.
A period during which I believed that I could keep people fully present, keep them with me, by preserving their mementos, their “things,” their totems.
The detritus of this misplaced belief now fills the drawers and closets of my apartment in New York. There is no drawer I can open without seeing something I do not want, on reflection, to see. There is no closet I can open with room left for the clothes I might actually want to wear. In one closet that might otherwise be put to such use I see, instead, three old Burberry raincoats of John’s, a suede jacket given to Quintana by the mother of her first boyfriend, and an angora cape, long since moth-eaten, given to my mother by my father not long after World War Two. In another closet I find a chest of drawers and perilously stacked assortment of boxes. I open one of the boxes. I find photographs taken by my grandfather when he was a mining engineer in the Sierra Nevada in the early years of the twentieth century. In another of the boxes I find the scraps of lace and embroidery that my mother had salvaged from her own mother’s boxes of mementos.
The jet beads.
The ivory rosaries.
The objects for which there is no satisfactory resolution.
In the third of the boxes I find skein after skein of needlepoint yarn, saved in the eventuality that remedial stitches might ever be required on a canvas completed and given away in 2001. In the chest of drawers I find papers written by Quintana when she was still at the Westlake School for Girls: the research study on stress, the analysis of Angel Clare’s role in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. I find her Westlake summer uniforms, I find her navy-blue gym shorts. I find the blue-and-white pinafore she wore for volunteering at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. I find the black wool challis dress I bought her when she was four at Bendel’s on West Fifty-seventh Street. When I bought that black wool challis dress Bendel’s was still on West Fifty-seventh Street. It was that long ago. Bendel’s became after Geraldine Stutz stopped running it just another store but when it was still on West Fifty-seventh Street and I bought that dress it was special, it was everything I wanted either one of us to wear, it was all Holly’s Harp chiffon and lettuce edges and sizes zero and two.
Other objects for which there is no satisfactory resolution.
I continue opening boxes.
I find more faded and cracked photographs than I want ever again to see.
I find many engraved invitations to the weddings of people who are no longer married.
I find many mass cards from the funerals of people whose faces I no longer remember.
In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment.
In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.
How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.
8
Her depths and shallows, her quicksilver changes.
Of course they were not allowed to remain just that, depths, shallows, quicksilver changes.
Of course they were eventually assigned names, a “diagnosis.” The names kept changing. Manic depression for example became OCD and OCD was short for obsessive-compulsive disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder became something else, I could never remember just what but in any case it made no difference because by the time I did remember there would be a new name, a new “diagnosis.” I put the word “diagnosis” in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which a “diagnosis” led to a “cure,” or in fact to any outcome other than a confirmed, and therefore an enforced, debility.
Yet another demonstration of medicine as an imperfect art.
She was depressed. She was anxious. Because she was depressed and because she was anxious she drank too much. This was called medicating herself. Alcohol has its own well-known defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested—ask any doctor—that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known. This would seem a fairly straight-forward dynamic, yet, once medicalized—once the depths and shallows and quicksilver changes had been assigned names—it appeared not to be. We went through many diagnoses, many conditions that got called by many names, before the least programmatic among her doctors settled on one that seemed to apply. The name of the condition that seemed to apply was this: “borderline personality disorder.” “Patients with this diagnosis are a complex mixture of strengths and weaknesses that confuse the diagnostician and frustrate the psychotherapist.” So notes a 2001 New England Journal of Med
icine review of John G. Gunderson’s Borderline Personality Disorder: A Clinical Guide. “Such patients may seem charming, composed, and psychologically intact one day and collapse into suicidal despair the next.” The review continues: “Impulsivity, affective lability, frantic efforts to avoid abandonment, and identity diffusion are all hallmarks.”
I had seen most of these hallmarks.
I had seen the charm, I had seen the composure, I had seen the suicidal despair.
I had seen her wishing for death as she lay on the floor of her sitting room in Brentwood Park, the sitting room from which she had been able to look into the pink magnolia. Let me just be in the ground, she had kept sobbing. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.
I had seen the impulsivity.
I had seen the “affective lability,” the “identity diffusion.”
What I had not seen, or what I had in fact seen but had failed to recognize, were the “frantic efforts to avoid abandonment.”
How could she have ever imagined that we could abandon her?
Had she no idea how much we needed her?
I recently read for the first time several fragments of what she had referred to at the time she wrote them as “the novel I’m writing just to show you.” She must have been thirteen or fourteen when this project occurred to her. “Some of the events are based on the truth and the others are fictitious,” she advises the reader at the outset. “The names have not yet been definitively changed.” The protagonist in these fragments, also fourteen and also named Quintana (although sometimes referred to by other names, presumably trials for the definitive changes to come), believes she may be pregnant. She consults, in a plot point that seems specifically crafted to “confuse the diagnostician and frustrate the psychotherapist,” her pediatrician. The pediatrician advises her that she must tell her parents. She does so. Her idea of how her parents would respond seems, like the entire rest of the plot point involving the pregnancy, confused, a fantasy, a manifestation of what might be extreme emotional distress or might be no more than narrative inventiveness: “They said that they would provide the abortion but after that they did not even care about her any more. She could live in their suburbia house in Brentwood, but they didn’t even care what she did any more. That was fine in her book. Her father had a bad temper, but it showed that they cared very much about their only child. Now, they didn’t even care any more. Quintana would lead her life any way she wanted.”