Run River

by Joan Didion

  “What,” he said now. “What have you been reading, baby.”

  “The Anatomy of Melancholy. It’s number twenty-two on the list.”

  “She asked me for a reading list,” Everett said as Martha started back up the stairs. “I gave her one from Stanford. She’s already read about half the books on it.”

  “Strange little creature,” Mr. McClellan said.

  “You upset her,” Everett said with apparent effort.

  Mr. McClellan ignored him. “Melancholia’s one study you don’t need any lessons in,” he shouted up the stairs. “You strange little creature.”

  “Your brother thinks I upset you,” he added as Martha came trailing downstairs again with a swimming suit in one hand.

  “Poor old Everett,” Martha said indulgently.

  “Don’t be a fool, Everett. Now let that girl get suited up.”

  They swam in the river, striking out for the far bank and swimming downstream with the current, still running cold with late melting snow from the mountains. When Everett reached the bank he waded back out to where the shallow ledge dropped off into the channel and pulled Lily, still struggling with the current, across the ledge and up onto the bank.

  “You do all right,” he said, pulling himself up after her.

  “I always think I’ll get dragged under.” She did not let go his arm.

  He moved as if to push her back into the water and then caught her, laughing, his arms low on her back.

  “You better not,” she laughed.

  “Why not.”

  “You just better not.” She was pleased with their dialogue: it had about it the authentic ring of teasing, of inconsequentiality, that had eluded her at Berkeley. She had known all along that she could do it with someone she knew. Delighted, she lay back over Everett’s arms and stretched her legs in the hot dry air. By contracting her stomach she could make it concave beneath the wet coolness of Martha’s swimming suit. She lifted one leg and saw, besides the water still glistening on it, a long scratch on her left thigh, gradually turning bruised where Everett had pulled her across a submerged root into the shallow water.

  “You look good.” Everett touched the scratch.

  “I feel good.”

  “You have the prettiest legs,” Everett said slowly, “of any small girl I ever saw.”

  “I guess you like tall girls better.” There: she was still doing it.

  Everett looked at her, not smiling, and she was struck by anxiety: in her ignorance of how the game was played she had said the wrong thing, broken some rule.

  “I like you all right,” he said after a while, still looking at her. “I never thought about it until last night.”

  “Never thought about what?”

  Everett said nothing, and she wondered if she had angered or disappointed him, wondered if it was possible that she could lose Everett McClellan, in the sense that you could lose people who were not your father or your brother.

  “I wish you would kiss me,” she whispered, feeling again that Everett was suddenly not Everett but a stranger, someone to be won.

  He kissed her, and she clung to him a long time, watching the oak leaves swimming against the sun and feeling the ends of her hair floating just on the surface of the water and after a while opening her mouth and pulling down the straps of Martha’s bathing suit, before his hand tightened over the scratch on her left thigh. All right, she whispered over and over, and after a while she began to think it could never happen because it hurt so much. When Everett finally said, again and again in a kind of triumph, you feel it? baby feel it, she assumed that it had happened. Later the scratch on her thigh became infected from the river water and left a drawn white scar noticeable whenever her legs got brown, but she did not think of it at the time.

  6

  Lily, he whispered every time as he lay spent in the rising morning heat, but she hesitated, equivocated, wondered if she was really obliged to marry him simply because he had wanted and taken her.

  That was in June. In July, when she figured that she had been screwed (the word, which she had heard Everett use in reference to someone else, pleased her with its crisp efficiency, its lack of ambiguity) a total of twenty-seven times, they once had an entire morning to spend: coming back from the narrow strip of beach they waded in the irrigation ditches, knee-deep in the soft ditch grass and slow muddy water, the sun hot on their heads. All around them were her father’s orchards: the pears hanging warm and heavy, dropping to rot on the ground beneath the trees, going brown and bruised and drawing flies, going to waste in that endless summer as she, thank God and Everett, was not. She let her dress trail in the water and ran splashing through the ditch with her eyes closed against the sun. Catching her, Everett rubbed her face and bare sunburned arms with the cloudy river water that bubbled from a supply pipe; they laughed (Everett you fool my sunglasses I like you for being so brown Everett baby so hard I love you) and fell down again together, for the pickers were working the far orchards that week, and when she screamed beneath him, remembering that snakes infested the ditches, he neither told her that there was no snake nor told her that the snake (if there was one) was harmless, but picked her up and held her until she was quiet and until the snake (if there was a snake at all) had gone away. Shortly before noon she told Everett that she would marry him, and then she ran up to the house to change her dress for lunch. It seemed as inescapable as the ripening of the pears, as fated as the exile from Eden.

  She mentioned it, however, to no one; scarcely thought of it away from Everett. Through day after summer day she moved as if sunstruck, dimly aware that any announcement would disturb the delicately achieved decision which had been, really, no decision at all: only an acquiescence. Was it, after all, so inevitable? The word why, once spoken out loud, could bring the pears all tumbling down. She would have to say that she loved him: it was the only incantation which would satisfy them, even as it would dispel her own illusions. Unspoken, it might still be true.

  Everett remained the flaw in the grain. His constant and incontrovertible presence intruded upon her, prevented her from contemplating the idea of him, from polishing that idea into some acceptable fact. Sometimes when she came downstairs in the morning Everett would be sitting there, reading the Chronicle; he would call her several times during the day, and a suggestion, from Edith Knight, that she and Lily might go to San Francisco for the day could throw him into such despair that he would call every half-hour, all evening, to see when they were going, what they would do, when they would be home. Every scene Lily saw seemed to include Everett; all she heard was Everett’s voice, asking when they would be married.

  “I don’t know,” she said finally one morning on the river. “I mean I don’t want to think about it right now.”

  “When do you want to think about it? Next year? The year after?”

  “Everett. Stop talking that way. I’m nervous. All brides are nervous.” She had read in a magazine that all brides were nervous, and had wondered whether that might not be her only problem: an apprehension which would turn out to be not unique but common to all women.

  “If you could just leave me alone a little,” she added, hopeful that she might be right.

  “Leave you alone,” Everett repeated. “I want to marry you. I don’t know how many times I have to say it.”

  “Wait until the hops are down,” she said finally. “You’re too busy now, you know that.”

  “I’m not too busy to tell people. Don’t you want to tell people?”

  “No,” she said faintly. “I don’t.”

  “You have to. You have to do it now.”

  “I told them I’m not going back down to Berkeley. So they might have guessed.” She had told her parents that she wanted to take a semester off; as far as their guessing the other went, she had invested her faith in the extreme improbability of their guessing anything at all. Putting asunder the delicate balance of dependency among them seemed every day more unthinkable.

 
“You have to tell them. Your father likes me all right. Although nobody’d know you did, the way you act when they’re around.”

  “I’m not demonstrative.” She picked up a white pebble and skimmed it across the surface of the water, angling it downstream to catch the drift. “I don’t guess you learned to skip stones like that at Stanford.”

  “Lily,” he pleaded, sitting up and grasping her shoulders. “Listen to me.”

  She traced an L and a K and half of McC on his chest with her fingernail, not looking at his face.

  “There’s no use talking to Daddy until he gets the fruit out of the way,” she said at last.

  But when all the pears had been shipped to the canneries and the hops on the McClellan place had been down six weeks, she still had told no one.

  “I don’t think you want to,” Everett said finally. “I don’t believe you want to marry me.”

  “Ah, sweet.” She kissed the back of his neck, ran a finger down his backbone. “It’s not you.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s anyone. Sometimes I don’t want to marry anyone. Some afternoons I lie on my bed and the light comes through the shutters on the floor and I think I never want to leave my own room.”

  “You’ll have a whole house. Isn’t that better?”

  She patted his hand and looked away down the river. “It’s your father’s house,” she said finally, grasping at the nearest point although not the one she had in mind.

  “We’ll build another house if you want. Would you like that?”

  “I don’t know.” She was abruptly weary of trying to talk to Everett at all. “I don’t think you understand what I mean.”

  He turned away from her. “No. I don’t think I do.”

  She felt, as physically as she would a headache, the weight of Everett’s vulnerability.

  “Of course I want to,” she said flatly. “You know I want to.”

  Although they agreed that she would have told Edith and Walter Knight by the time Everett came by for dessert that night, she had not. Telling them, she whispered to Everett when she opened the door, was impossible. Accepting this as fact, he got up from Walter Knight’s table and drove Lily to Reno that October evening, the night the year’s first snow settled over the Sierra Nevada, and had her declared his wife in the name of Washoe County and the State of Nevada. The ceremony was witnessed by the wife and son of the justice: the son pulled on blue jeans, the fly open, over his maroon-striped pajamas; the wife, roused unwillingly but dutiful, smiled drowsily and patted Lily’s hair. Not quite eighteen, Lily had the distinct impression throughout the ceremony that her lie about her age would render the marriage invalid, nullify the entire affair, no tears, nothing irrevocable, only a polite misunderstanding among good acquaintances. Later, from their hotel room, she called down a telegram reading “MARRIED EVERETT NOW AT RIVERSIDE RENO HOME SOON LOVE LILY”; whatever her extravagances, long telegrams were not among them. Everett called the ranch to tell his father, but Martha answered the telephone.

  Covering the receiver, Everett turned to Lily, who sat, still wearing the skirt and sweater she had worn at dinner, on the edge of the bed with Hotel Riverside embroidered on the sheets.

  “Martha’s crying. She says I’m leaving her alone.”

  “You’ll be living right there.”

  “She says that’s not the same thing and I must be a fool to think it is.”

  Lily lay down on the bed and buried her face in the pillow. She wanted nothing so much as to have her father there, to be downstairs watching him shoot craps, lulled by the action, the play of chips and silver on the green board, the ring of the silver dollars as he stacked them. Make it the hard way.

  “Maybe she’s right,” she said, her voice muffled.

  They stayed a week in Reno. Lily bought a toothbrush and a pair of stockings in a Rexall drugstore, located some white cotton underwear in a shop specializing in trick holsters and mesh briefs embroidered with the days of the week, and ran into a Sacramento girl, Janie Powers, in the Riverside lobby. Apprehended by Janie as she stood, that first morning, wondering whether Everett would think himself slighted if she ate breakfast without waking him, Lily could not at first think how to explain her presence in Reno; as it turned out, she did not have to. “I’m getting a divorce,” Janie caroled across twenty-some feet of lobby. “What are you doing?” Although Lily could not remember knowing that Janie had even been married, she supposed she must have heard and forgotten; she could never keep straight the social details which so absorbed her mother. “I’m going out to buy a sweater,” Lily said guiltily. “I’m just up for a few days and I forgot an extra sweater.” “Never mind that,” Janie said. “I’ve got dozens. Have breakfast with me.” Once they were seated, Janie launched into a monologue about her husband, who was being très impossible (“I can’t even spend one night on the California side of the lake or he’ll contest my residency, he’s got somebody watching me night and day”), and it was not until they had finished a second cup of coffee that she again asked what Lily was doing in Reno. “Nothing special,” Lily said, pretending to look for a clock. “Listen. I promised to wake up my mother.”

  Two days later, Everett saw Janie Powers sitting at a blackjack table in Harold’s Club and asked her to have dinner with him and Lily. (“You darlings,” Janie kept saying at dinner. “Up here on a honeymoon and this sweet little thing keeping it a secret from Janie.” After two whiskey sours and a bottle of wine, Janie was struck by “the irony of it: Lily getting married, me getting—anyway. Très symbolique.”)

  Other than Janie, they saw no one. Everett slept late in the mornings (Lily seemed to have known, always, the way he would look and feel beside her in bed, a comfortable if not particularly electrifying thing) and shot craps a little in the afternoons; Lily got up early, careful not to wake him, and walked by herself up one side of Virginia Street and down the other, stopping always on the bridge to watch the ducks on the Truckee River. She had asked Everett, thinking it might be wifely, if she could get him some toothpaste or shorts or something; he had looked at her a long time, laughed, and said that he could take care of himself. One morning she thought she saw the son of the justice who had performed their marriage, and she turned immediately into a coffee shop and began dropping nickels into a slot machine. Although she did not want him to see her, it seemed important that she see him (had it, after all, happened?), and after he had passed by she ran out and watched until he turned the corner, but could not be certain that he had been the one. All she could remember clearly was his voice, an Okie voice: Ain’t she the prettiest little bride we had all week, now. One evening they had dinner on the California side of Lake Tahoe; another they drove at twilight over the Geiger grade to Virginia City and found, there in the cemetery on the hill, the grave of someone in Everett’s family. Francis Scott Currier: B. 1830, D. 1859. R.I.P. 2000 miles from home, 1½ miles from the Ophir. They played tennis twice, and Lily ate lobster, in the dining room at the Riverside, for the first time in her life. It seemed then that the lobster alone lent those few days in Reno a distinct air of celebration, the flavor of a wedding trip.

  When Everett took Lily home a week after their marriage, Edith Knight presented him with a kiss on each cheek and Lily with a list of two hundred people who had been invited to the reception. A practiced saver of situations, she had already begun a scrapbook pasted with clippings from the Sacramento and San Francisco papers. Each showed Lily in a white middy blouse, her Dominican graduation picture. There was even one clipping from the Los Angeles Times, headlined “Former Solon’s Daughter Wed in Nevada.”

  Everett seemed bemused not only by the clippings but by the prospect of the reception: he took the list from Lily and studied it, asked about a few of the names on it, seemed to forget, and asked again. “This is quite a large party,” he said finally.

  “You were the one so crazy to get it institutionalized,” Lily whispered absently, touching the back of his neck with her fingers. It ha
d just occurred to her that in all the years she had known the McClellans, they had never, except for Sarah’s wedding, four years before, given a party. Even Sarah’s wedding, or as much of it as Lily could remember, had seemed oddly improvised, an affair which included all the accouterments of other weddings but remained, in some vital way, not entirely a party.

  “I just wanted to marry you,” Everett whispered.

  “Well, you did.” Lily raised her voice. “Where’s Daddy?”

  “It’s such an off season,” Edith Knight fretted. “It can’t be a garden party and it can’t be a holiday party. If you’d waited six weeks we could have used Christmas trees. Something festive.”

  “The bride,” Lily said, “is generally considered attraction enough. I said where’s Daddy.”

  Edith Knight shrugged. “In his office, I suppose. I don’t believe he’s left the house in five days. He’s been no help with the arrangements. No help whatsoever.”

  Lily stood outside her father’s office, then opened the door without knocking. He was sitting behind his desk, looking out the window toward the island bridge. Everett’s Ford was clearly visible in the driveway; her father had known she was home.

  “Well Lily,” he said, turning away from the window. “The child bride.”

  “I see we got a good press.”

  “Lily McClellan.” He gave the dry laugh Lily recognized as forced. “How does that sound?”

  The words seemed to hang unnaturally between them. Lily averted her eyes.

  Laughing again, Walter Knight walked around the desk and put his hand out, tentatively. “Well,” he said.

  Although it did not seem likely that he had intended shaking hands with her, his hand was there, and so Lily shook it. He did not seem to know what to do then, and patted her shoulder gingerly.

  “Good to have you back,” he said finally, as if she had been a long time in a far place, and then, apparently relieved to have hit upon the phrase, he repeated it.