by Joan Didion
After class, Everett had stopped Doris Jeanne and asked her which position she preferred, a phrasing which afforded her a great deal of unconcealed delight. When Everett explained, blushing, that he meant did she want to argue John C. Frémont was a Patriot or did she want to argue John C. Frémont was an Opportunist, Doris Jeanne looked at him a long time, slipped the polo coat off her shoulders, removed from her large red shoulder bag a blue vial of Evening in Paris Eau de Cologne, and dabbed the stopper behind her ears and in the crooks of her elbows. Then she replaced the vial, snapped the bag closed, and asked Everett who John C. Frémont was. After he had told her, she smiled crookedly, arranged the bag on her shoulder, and said, “It don’t make me no never-mind, honey.”
Mostly because he would have preferred it himself, Everett offered Doris Jeanne the “Patriot” position, and she eventually stood up before the class with her polo coat on, daintily applied Evening in Paris to her wrists in full view of twenty-four entranced students and Mrs. Nalley, the English teacher, and presented an original defense in which Jessie Benton and John C. Frémont emerged curiously as refugees from some early-day phenomenon not unlike the Dust Bowl. Although she had taken a clear fancy to the Frémonts, she could not escape the impression that they had first entered California in a secondhand Ford, and the entire exercise left Mrs. Nalley so unnerved that she excused her classes for the rest of the day.
The debate was otherwise without incident, and Everett did not speak to Doris Jeanne again until the class picnic, when her brother, who played baseball with Everett, urged him to sneak off to the river and share a half-gallon of valley red with him and Doris Jeanne, who was included in the first place only because she had negotiated the purchase. After a while Alfred Coe went to sleep over beyond an Indian mound, and Doris Jeanne, with lifeless dispatch, took care of Everett. A few days later she cornered him in the hall at school, pressed up against him as he stood backed against his open locker, and began playing lovingly with his collar; she wanted to do it again out behind the backstop during seventh period, when there were no teams on the field, but Everett hesitated, and Doris Jeanne said he was strictly a drag and could stew in his own juice. Later that semester, after the intercession of her brother, Everett wrote a term paper for Doris Jeanne on the subject “Will Semple Green: Father of Irrigation in the Northern Valley.” Unhappily neither Mrs. Nalley nor the vice-principal who was called in as arbitrator could be persuaded that “Will Semple Green: Father of Irrigation in the Northern Valley” was entirely Doris Jeanne’s work, and in the pressure of this controversy Doris Jeanne quit school. That she never named Everett made him admire her, and feel obscurely guilty that he had failed to do a more convincing job for her. Several years later he saw a picture of her in the San Francisco Examiner; described as a “curvaceous model and sometime waitress at an El Camino Real supper club,” she had instituted a paternity suit against a football player with a Polish name. Although she had changed her name to Dori Lee, Everett recognized the picture, and wondered if she would remember him. He thought not.
After Doris Jeanne it had been nobody: necking in cars on hot summer nights with the back doors open so you could lie with your legs out and sometimes even lying almost naked and covered with sweat, but never doing it; once or twice or three times even lying in somebody’s bed at parties given by boys whose parents were away, lying naked under the sheet with girls who had been drinking bourbon and Seven-Up and wanted to go to sleep, lying there for hours and kissing girls who probably would have done it had anyone insisted, but Everett never insisted; it was not, as Lily would have said, much his style.
Then there had been, at Stanford, a couple of girls who required less insistence: Annis McMahon, whom everyone else called alternately “Annie” and “Pooh” but whom Everett always called Annis, wishing upon her the dignity implied by her tall, cold, blond good looks. He liked to watch her play tennis, and long before he knew her he developed the habit of walking back to the Deke house from his eleven o’clock class by way of the courts where she played every noon. When it reached a point where he thought he wanted to watch her play tennis for the rest of his life, he asked Clark McCormack to introduce him to her. Once introduced, he called her three times a day, played tennis with her every afternoon, took her to the movies every Sunday night, and in May of his sophomore year, still determined that she should be the girl he had hoped she would be in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, he drove Annis McMahon down to Santa Cruz on two successive weekends. (On the third, he found out later, Clark McCormack drove her down to Santa Cruz.) They lay in a motel room with a mission tile table and a framed color photograph of Bridal Veil Falls at Yosemite, and she told him in the high nasal voice which had been his first disappointment about the difficulty she was having arranging her courses to obtain her teaching credential at the same time she received her degree in physical education and therapy. She got up from the bed every time as if she were getting out of a shower, ready, in a companionable way he found dispiriting in the extreme, to discuss it; stretched her incredible golden arms, lit a cigarette, opened all the blinds, and wrapped herself in his shirt, a gambit which might have seemed more winning had his shirt not fit her almost perfectly.
The next year there was Naomi Kahn, a Jewish girl from Beverly Hills whose grades were good, whose clothes smelled always as if they had just come from Bullock’s-Wilshire boxes (as a matter of fact they had not: Naomi ordered all her clothes from Bergdorf Goodman in New York), and whose mother and father were both, as she put it, in the Industry. She told Everett that her deepest wishes for her mother and father involved their abandoning screenwriting in favor of writing something like Winterset, and when that day came she would be more than happy, in answer to Everett’s query, to stop ordering her clothes from Bergdorf Goodman in New York, although for Everett’s information, Maxwell Anderson was not exactly on the relief rolls. Everett ought to get around more. Once the Kahns came up to Stanford to visit Naomi, and Mrs. Kahn later wrote that she considered Everett divine, an honest-to-Christ set piece, whereupon Naomi’s ardor for Everett began to cool. One night toward the end of their junior year she announced that she was driving to Reno the next day to marry a Berkeley graduate student who was active in the Young Communist League; the Kahns, after getting the marriage annulled, transferred Naomi to Sarah Lawrence. Although Everett never knew what happened to Naomi after that, he noticed the Kahns’ names from time to time among the credits on B comedies, and years later he read in Time that they were up before the Tenney Committee for having participated in the October 1943 Writers’ Congress at UCLA. They were listed as members of several oddly named organizations the function of which Everett did not entirely understand, were later indicted in Washington for contempt of Congress, and Everett reflected that Naomi, wherever she was, must have approved at last.
Actually Everett had liked Naomi Kahn: he had liked the way her clothes smelled and liked the slightly derisive way she went to bed; she did it exactly the way she wrote out a midterm or drove a car, with a style and efficiency he had never observed in any of the girls with whom he had grown up, and he loved it. He sometimes thought he even loved her, usually when she had gone to spend the weekend with her parents in Palm Springs and he was left with the alternatives of sitting around the house drinking beer or calling up somebody like Annis McMahon. Palo Alto the winter of 1939 seemed full of girls like Annis McMahon, and Everett’s appreciation of Naomi’s singular virtues grew until he actually regretted, for something like four days after she eloped with the Young Communist from Berkeley, that he had not asked her to marry him.
Nonetheless, Naomi Kahn had not been, any more than Annis McMahon or for that matter Doris Jeanne Coe had been, someone with whom he could have lived on the ranch. During those four days when he wished he had married Naomi he never once thought of living anywhere with her: they were always driving someplace together, or he was putting her on an airplane, or they were registering at the Fairmont in San Francisco an
d she had on a black hat with a veil.
In the end Naomi had been just like Annis McMahon and a dozen or so girls he had known not as well: something he had tried and abandoned, before the effort became too strenuous, and none of it had to do with Lily. Even as he imagined himself registering at the Fairmont with Naomi Kahn, Everett knew without thinking that what he would do was live on the ranch with Lily Knight, knew it so remotely that if he had heard, during the years he rarely saw her, that she had married someone else he would have wished her well and gone on thinking about Naomi Kahn at the Fairmont, and only somewhere in the unused part of his mind would he have begun wondering, with an urgency he would not have understood, what he was going to do with the rest of his life. Lily required no commitment: Lily was already there.
It had not occurred to him that he could lose her (had not occurred to him even that he wanted her) until the week he came home from Stanford and saw her sitting on her father’s terrace in a faded pink dress, the late afternoon sun on her dusty bare feet and a large safety pin in place of a missing screw on her sunglass frames. It had seemed to him then that to risk losing her would be to risk losing Martha and Sarah and himself as well, that she alone could retrieve and keep for him the twenty-one years he had already spent. Convinced that he could ill afford to leave her untended for even that one night, he fell asleep finally with his clothes on, a cigarette still burning in the ashtray on his bedroom window sill, and when he woke in the morning he set out immediately to secure for himself the haven of her faded pink dress, her bare feet, the safety pin in her sunglasses.
As far as the safety pin went, it remained in her sunglasses until the summer she was pregnant with Julie, when he told her one night, irritated partly because she had just uncovered a grocery bill she had lost three months before and partly because she had dragged a sheet down to the sun porch the night before and slept there until ten o’clock but irritated mostly because it had been 105° for three days and she had accused him of not loving her as her father had loved her, that the safety pin in her sunglasses summed up all her unattractive habits, her sloppiness of mind, her inability to accomplish the routine tasks that could be done with one hand by any of the girls he had known at Stanford. She had gone upstairs without speaking. When he came to bed she had pretended to be asleep, and she had gotten up at seven the next morning to drive into Sacramento. She returned at noon with a new screw in her sunglasses and with, as well, a book called The Managerial Revolution in which she later read the first and last chapters (she pretended to have read it all but he read it himself and saw that she had not), an album of French language records which as far as he knew she never played, eight dollars’ worth of closet bags and boxes, and a large account book in which she wrote down, for two weeks, the exact amounts both she and China Mary spent on food and household supplies. The book was in fact labeled “Food and Household Supplies,” and she had shown it proudly to Martha. The first day’s entry, Martha reported with a degree of admiration, began with an itemized list showing the unit prices, the amount saved by buying in quantity, and a tax breakdown wherever a tax was involved, on twenty-four bottles of beer, twelve cans of mixed carrots and peas, twelve cans of puréed liver, four quarts of milk, two cartons of Lucky Strikes, six tins of smoked oysters, and fifteen cans of Campbell’s Soup; five consommé, five vegetable-beef, five cream of chicken. Totaled, these items came to $18.53, and were followed by an entry which read “Etc.—$27 (about).” When Martha asked what the $27 represented, Lily, absorbed in contemplating the neatness of her figuring, had shrugged. “You know. A mop handle. Things.” After Lily had abandoned “Food and Household Supplies,” Everett tore the entry from the book, carried it around with him for a couple of weeks and finally put it in a drawer where he kept his Stanford diploma, a clipping about a no-hit game he had pitched in high school, and a letter from Martha describing the only 4-H meeting she ever attended.
The truth was simply that he would not have known what to do with a wife who knew what to do with a book labeled “Food and Household Supplies”: it was not Everett’s idea of a wife’s function. Although he was not sure what his idea of a wife’s function was, he knew that Lily had been closest to fulfilling it when she had been trying least. She simply did not know how. She would concentrate upon the details while the essence eluded her, unable to see that one entry in the Pillsbury Bake-Off did not make a Mrs. America.
There as everywhere, Lily failed, even as she tried with pathetic concentration, to apprehend what was expected of her. The most insignificant social encounter was for Lily, as Martha had pointed out at dinner one night this spring, fraught with the apprehension of possible peril.
“I mean Lily can’t say simple things like ‘thank you’ or ‘I’d rather not’ or ‘please may I have more coffee,’ ” Martha had added, turning then to Lily. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you but you can’t.”
“Nothing’s wrong with her,” Everett said, although he saw Martha’s point. He had only a week before learned that Lily was allergic to strawberries, which he had seen her eating with apparent delight innumerable times. “I thought your father liked them,” she said, in explanation.
“Everett, it’s true. I’m not being mean to Lily, I’m only observing something interesting. Somebody holds the door open for Lily in a hardware store, and she thinks she has a very complex situation on her hands.”
Martha poured the rest of a bottle of wine into Lily’s glass and sat back, watching Lily. “First Lily says thank you. Then she wonders: did he hear her? If he didn’t, was he thinking how rude she was? Assuming that he heard her, was just ‘thank you’ enough? If not, what more? On the other hand maybe ‘thank you’ was too much. Maybe she should have just smiled. Maybe he thought she’d been forward. In fact maybe she’d been mistaken in thinking he was holding the door for her at all. Possibly he’d been holding it for someone behind her, his wife, or an old lady. If that was the case, thanking him made her look a perfect fool, and now she can’t remember why she came to the hardware store in the first place, and every now and then all day she thinks about how she might have handled it. I mean the crises Lily faces from day to day.”
Lily had blown out the candles on the table and transparently misunderstood Martha: “I don’t think good manners are ever amiss,” she said. But later, when she was brushing her hair and he was working at the card table he had covered with tax records, he looked up and saw that she was crying, crying and brushing her hair as if she wanted to brush it out. He had put aside the depreciation schedule and picked her up in his arms, the hairbrush still in her hand. Her voice muffled against his shoulder, she explained that she wanted to be like other people, wanted to be able to talk to people. “You’re shy,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with being shy.” There was, Lily sobbed, something wrong with being shy when you were going on twenty-four years old, and anyway she was not shy, she was simply no good around people and that was that. He had lain on the bed with her and the hairbrush and told her that she was not to talk that way, that she was not other people. She was, he added, turning out the light, his baby. It occurred to Everett later that he had in that commonplace endearment put his finger on some of Lily’s virtues and certain of her failings.
17
Lily came home from San Francisco on a Greyhound bus crowded with Mexican pickers and sailors. From San Francisco to Vallejo she sat next to a sailor who was going to meet his girl in Salt Lake City. She lived with her folks in Salt Lake but Frisco, he explained, was their lucky town. They had met there, in a gin mill on Market Street, four days before he shipped out in 1943. When she promised to wait had been the A-1 moment in his life, and the second A-1 moment had been a week before on the U.S.S. Chester when he got his first sight in two years of the Golden Gate Bridge. There had been fog in the morning and when the fog broke he saw it there, shining way off in the distance like it wasn’t attached to anything. The band on the well deck had started in on “California Here I Come” and everybody ha
d belted it out along with the band and it might sound cornball to her but it made him want to sit down and bawl like a baby. Lily began to cry, struck by the superiority of his appreciations to her own, and the sailor said wait a minute, hold your horses, it wasn’t sad, honey, it was like women crying at weddings. She looked to him like the kind who cried at weddings. It was like that. When the sailor got off at Vallejo to wait for the Salt Lake express Lily wished him good luck and watched him covertly through the window. He was sitting on his duffel bag reading a comic book and eating a Milky Way, and she wanted to get off the bus and give him her garnet ring for his girl, but did not know how to go about it. It was not until the bus had rolled out of the station that Lily remembered that at any rate the garnet ring had been Everett’s grandmother’s and was therefore not in the strictest sense hers to give.
From Vallejo to Sacramento she sat next to a woman who was a part-time cashier at a drive-in across the highway from Hotel El Rancho, west of Sacramento. The woman had been in Vallejo visiting her daughter, who had a nice place, not large but fixed up cute, above a florist’s shop on Tennessee Street. No doubt Lily knew the florist’s shop. No? The woman had thought surely she would because they did all the society weddings in Vallejo, it was very well-known.
Regretful that she had not pretended to recognize the florist’s name and anxious that the woman not think she had been trying to snub her, Lily hurried to surmount what seemed to her an impasse by asking if the daughter were married. Well, not exactly. It seemed that Sue Ann’s husband, a seaman first class but a bastard from the word go, had got his at Okinawa—Sue Ann had been just about set to blow the whistle anyway, as far as that went—and Sue Ann was now supporting their six-year-old son, Billy Jack, by car-hopping at Stan’s off U.S. 40.